LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, \ 

# 




# 




UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



HALF TINTS 



HALF TINTS: 
1 



TABLE D'HOTE 



DRAWING-ROOM, 





, a ry of Co/,^ 


% 




NEW YORK: 


). APPLETON & CO., 


443 and 445 BROADWAY. 




1867. 




/ 



To a? 3? 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 
D. APPLETON & CO., 
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 
Southern District of New York. 



CONTENTS. 



' •♦• 



PAGE 
I. 

Commonplace, 7 

II. 
Come, ........ 19 

in. 

The Universe, 31 

IV. 
Little Ones, ........ 43 

V. 

Table d'Hote, . . . . . . .55 

yi. 

Drawing-Room, VI 



6 CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

VII. 
Gentlemen's Paeloe, 91 



YIIL 
The Exchange, 107 

IX. 
An Inmate, 121 

X. 

Not a Seemon, . . . . . . 133 

XL 
Happiness, . ... . . . . 149 

XII. 

Pooe Bodies, . . . . . . . 161 

XIII. 
Pooe Souls, . . . . . . . 179 

XIV. 

And So Foeth, . . . . . . 201 

XV. 
Out of the Window, 219 



COMMONPLACE. 



HALF TINTS. 



COMMONPLACE. 

Jack, my boy, will you give me your ears 
awhile ? I feel an impulse to talk a little. 
And don't take offence at my familiar way. 
Remember that as John and man I've never 
known yon. 

Do you never rub your eyes and strain 
back to that long ago? Do your faculties 
never swim in remembrances of it ? Do you 
never have periods of abstraction, when mem- 
ories become actualities, and all sense for 

present things is suspended or inoperative? 
1* 



10 HALF TINTS. 

To me they occur often, floating me off my 
feet and out of myself. No matter how busy 
or absorbing the situation, the exacting pres- 
ent is shut out, and the old time comes back, 
warm and radiant as our boyhood painted it. 
Only the other morning, hurrying through 
the thoroughfare of the great town, jostled by 
the crowd of active men with desperate pur- 
poses, I happened mechanically to glance 
down a side street to the tidal river, when I 
suddenly became as unconscious of the rush 
and roar as if staggering in a syncope. The 
water seemed actually to rise and blend with 
the sky, and the thronging vessels to be trans- 
muted into clouds, transfigured, but retaining 
the essential lines and proportions of marine 
architecture. And the sun was shaded to 
soften the vision. The celestial fleet, floating 
sublimely as a great soul at rest, was freighted 
with the hopes and loves and ambitions of 
my youth, and chief amongst the radiant 
faces on the shining decks shone the lovely 
lineaments of one you remember with an ardor 



COMMONPLACE. 11 

next to my own. Mary still, but beatified, as 
Beatrice to Dante. And Eliza, her insepara- 
ble companion, as you were mine, stood by 
her side. How much, Jack, those beautiful, 
modest, bright girls were to us. I am sure 
that for years we never did a doubtful thing 
without a fear of their knowing it, and God 
knows how many ill things that guardian con- 
sciousness deterred us from. Last at night 
and first in the morning came thoughts of 
my little Mary, and pure they were as their 
subject. And with something of awe her 
presence inspired me. We never talked of 
the things always in our thoughts, and when 
happiest we talked not at all. That sweet 
baptism Motherwell describes as the silentness 
of joy, and Lowell more at large in his apos- 
trophe : 

Oh, sweet Silence ! They belied thee 
Who have called thee weak and vain ; 

Speech is emptiness beside thee, 

Joy and woe have glorified thee ; 
Love and longing never seek 
Any better way to speak. 



12 HALF TINTS. 

Coherency at such times was as impossible as 
steadiness to palsy. The happiness her pres- 
ence inspired composed my soul, cushioning 
the faculties like a sweet sleep. The tongue 
forgot its cunning. Separating from her, the 
magic thraldom would only too sensibly be 
felt, as the waking senses consciously disen- 
chant themselves of the stuff that dreams are 
made of. Tou know the sensations well 
enough, repeated over and over again in your 
relations, present and absent, with Eliza, and 
repeated to every man with a man's heart, 
human enough for its best uses. Why, Jack, 
it did seem that I lost my conceit some- 
times, so absorbed I was with her, elbowing 
myself perpetually, without a thought of sac- 
rifice, by never-ceasing, ever-varying accom- 
modations to her wishes and whims. If you 
do not remember, it is nevertheless a fact, that 
I learned to write her name before I could 
write my own. I never saw a very red glis- 
tening apple, nor a perfect, blushing, delicious 
peach, without growing sinfully covetous of it, 



COMMONPLACE. 13 

as a fitting little gift to her, so all-deserving. 
In the class I would deliberately misspell the 
word rather than go above her. I never saw 
a smooth beech-tree but I cut our initials upon 
it, never omitting to cut also a ring round 
them, that another might not get in. Never 
shall I forget the pretty pink bonnets she 
always wore on smiling Sunday mornings, and 
the conscious looks we gave each other across 
the aisle. You remember, no doubt, that 
pleasant time in the sugar-camp, when all 
four of us, with each a mug of delicious syrup, 
went down to the brook to cool it and drink. 
"We were too earnest for jokes with or about 
the sweet lasses. And you have not forgotten 
how in the still summer days we sometimes 
wandered to that same little stream and waded 
in the pure water, and how the timid little 
things ventured out, their white toes spread- 
ing over the clean pebbles like live things. 
Holmes's picture reminds us : 

Maidens dancing on the grapes, 
Their milk-white ankles splashed with red. 



14 HALF TINTS. 

You are a ripened man, and so am I, but 
it would be sacrilege to forget these things. 
Trifles they are, no doubt, and shamefacedly 
referred to, if at all, but inestimably have they 
contributed to us. If Mary and Eliza are not 
our wives, the good women who are are none 
the worse for our innocent tenderness to them. 
Job, my bachelor friend, broadly asserts that 
he advises the girls never to marry men who 
have not been in love a dozen times; that it 
is with the affections as with the muscles ; 
they grow and strengthen by use. Grotesque, 
of course, and extravagant, but a little of 
truth may be found in it as in every thing. 
My gilded memories of Mary come out of the 
past and help me to appreciate another who 
is better, as the vintage of half an age is pref- 
erable to the raw juices, unpurified by long 
voyaging upon the fretful sea and unmellowed 
by years of sanctifying repose. If I shut my 
eyes sometimes and dream of innocent pleas- 
ures, as Paul's with Yirginia, I am sure a new 
touch of tenderness and delicacy unconsciously 



COMMONPLACE. 15 

attends my caresses of that other Mary who 
sits by my side, her memory, perhaps, idly 
summoning up blithe blinks of some sunny 
boy, which have helped to make her, the 
Maker of us all knows how much, the good 
woman she is to me. It is true we do not 
speak to each other of these things, but as- 
sume them, nevertheless. Age, said Grand- 
father Titbottom, with a smile of immortal 
youth, is not a matter of years, but of feel- 
ing. My wife and I lately talked of this after 
reading one of the thoughtful essays of John 
Foster. In no way can we account for ourselves 
so well as by a careful review and analysis of 
the associates which chance or affinity have 
put in our way. So good and lovable is my 
wife, that in robbing her of one memory I 
should risk making her so much the less charm- 
ing and saintly. If some remembrances force 
from her a sigh, I would not make her obliv- 
ious of them any more than I would put out 
the light of her beaming eyes. In her integ- 
rity I have her and would keep her, here and 



16 HALF TINTS. 

hereafter. Think of a self-righteous, conceited 
reader, who would presume to tear ' out inex- 
plicable or exceptional passages of the Good 
Book as he read them. 

[Mary the First, you know, is now a widow, 
and lives in one of your beautiful Western 
cities. The prosperous drover she married I 
never saw, nor do I regret it. My only im- 
pressions of him are got from a hideous por- 
trait which hangs over the parlor mantel. 
Some years ago (my wife accounted for the 
delay by a storm on the lake) I travelled out 
of my way to pay the widow a visit. I found 
her plump and rosy as Hebe, and without the 
aid of dressmaker or cosmetics. The snug 
little sofa we snugly occupied during the even- 
ing was little roomier than the modern old 
gentleman's easy-chair. But oh, how the por- 
trait glared upon us. I declare to you, Jack, 
I never behaved so well in all my life as while 
in its awful presence. The stiff, stick fingers 
I felt tempted to knock off with my cane 
while waiting for the little charmer to come 



COMMONPLACE. 17 

in. Its one wholly visible ear seemed to move 
and belly like the sail of a sloop to catch every 
syllable of our interesting talk. The thin hair 
was brushed so sleek, and had such a pomatum 
gloss, that never a fly had dared to light upon 
it. The eyes, as Thackeray would say, gog- 
gled round savage. The complexion had the 
hue of a peeled egg a little browned in the 
roasting. One side of the glossy blue coat 
hung so heavily that I shall believe till my 
dying day there was a stiletto in it. Several 
times since that night with the frightful pic- 
ture and the cherry-lipped relict, I have seen 
in my dreams the treacherous weapon steal 
from its scabbard of shiny broadcloth, and felt 
it push its way persistently between my ribs, 
as a pin pierces a pippin. A moment's gush, 
then gone forever. Oh, if there be a legacy a 
dying man can leave utterly to damn his mem- 
ory, it is a portrait, forever to embarrass his 
widow.] 



n. 

COME. 



II. 

COME. 

Jack, you are a philosopher, and have never 
travelled. You have been contented to grow 
with your cattle and corn on your fat Mississippi 
acres, while I have roamed like a vagrant over 
the world. I have wished often we could see 
each other as we are, to compare notes and 
mark progress. Leave, I pray you, your short- 
horns and sorghum, and spend a fortnight with 
me amidst gas, and tall buildings, and horse- 
cars. Leave your accustomed ruts, and get 
into others as different as Nantucket from 
Chicago. I do not say you will go home a 
wiser or a better man. 

If you come, let me suggest you stay at 



22 HALF TINTS. 

The Universe. You would find the great hotel 
a world within itself. Creature-comforts would 
close round you like a pillow. Every thing 
you could wish would be anticipated, or could 
be had for the asking, all set down method- 
ically in your bill, silently slipped under your 
door every seventh-day morning. The porter 
taking your luggage at the door will be civil 
and sturdy, and a greenback will reward him. 
The two or three clerks at the office will be as 
clean and smiling as bridegrooms. But let me 
suggest thus early that you have an eye to the 
devices. All here is gold that glitters. Pre- 
sent yourself at the marble counter with im- 
pressive and masterly deliberation, with the 
repose of power and distinction, your great- 
coat buttoned carefully to the chin. Before 
ungloving to register your name, very quietly 
inquire if some celebrity, most in the news- 
papers for the time being, has arrived and 
asked after you. Be sure to do this with a 
quiet air verging on indifference ; for studied 
quietness in these times and places is every 



COME. 23 

thing. Your comfort during your stay will 
very much depend on these apparently trifling 
things. But observe that the extreme of quiet- 
ness may be as unfortunate as the unconscious 
ease of a man in his own house ; it will argue 
the guest an over-actor, or timid and unac- 
quainted with the world. The Boots will de- 
tect either, and vote him a bumpkin or a boor. 
Balancing means and ends is nice exercise, 
and busies the ingenuity of the world. People 
who do not learn the art, rarely get the worth 
of their labor or money. Their best attain- 
ments may be too expensive; to accomplish 
little they may risk all. A conceit illustrating 
it came into my head this morning, and curled 
into rhyme insensibly : 

'Twas of an Irishman crossing a field, 

With a scythe swung over his shoulder : 
Espying a snake in the grass concealed, 

And finding not near him a bowlder, 
Or stick, or weapon of any kind, 

Determined with snath to kill : 
Forgetting the blade his neck was behind, 

The blow he aimed with skill : 



24: HALF TINTS. 

The snake at once was killed quite dead, 
But the blade cut off the Irishman's head. 

[You never rhyme ? Sorry for it. I thought 
every man fit to live had a twist of the sort in 
him.] 

Job's experience is suggestive. Having 
been unfortunate in the treatment he received 
at one of the great hotels, he resolved, upon re- 
turning to town, to try another, varying his man- 
ner, and summoning all his resources to make 
his presence impressive and commanding. In 
the most leisurely way he stepped out of the 
carriage, into the office, and up to the counter, 
and registered his name. The elegant clerk, 
taking the pen from his hand in a graceful 
way, was about to assign him to 1001 or 1007, 
or some other interior room under the eaves, 
looking out upon a court into which a ray of 
clean sunshine had never entered, when he 
suggested in an indifferent way that if the 

Governor and General called, he wished 

them shown to his room. A scarcely percepti- 
ble tremor was observed in the obliging gentle- 



COME. 25 

man's fingers, and instead of the four unwritten 
skyward figures was placed opposite his name 
a single numeral, assigning a large and richly- 
furnished apartment on the first floor, near the 
grand parlor, and looking out upon the green 
and shaded and yet dewy square. It was a 
morning in midsummer, and the view was de- 
lightful ; not telescopic and grand as yours 
over your fat valley, but, to a bachelor, who 
has always lived in cities, inspiring. He was 
shown up by the sagacious clerk in person, 
who, in a flattering but humble way, opened 
the windows, pushed back the lace curtains, 
and let in the fresh and fragrant air in a flood. 
Three brimming pitchers of ice-water came 
one after another unasked, and Job declares 
that a king on his throne never reposed in 
greater magnificence of feeling. 

And, by the way, he always adds, after 
relating the circumstance, that later in the 
morning he went into the barber's room of 
the hotel to have the dust, gathered on the 
road from the sea, brushed out of his whiskers, 



26 HALF TINTS. 

and found the tonsorial professor at an open 
window, in an easy-chair, engaged with the 
summer number of the North American. He 
rose not with the precipitation usual under 
such circumstances with gentlemen of that pro- 
fession, but with the ease of opulence and the 
serenity of a senator. Expressing a wish to 
have his boots polished, another gentleman, as 
illustrative of self-respect as the hair-dresser, 
stepped from a side-room, and protecting him- 
self with a clean toga of linen, went to work 
at the leather with as much apparent pride 
and dignity as a chief justice arranging his 
dicta. "While Job's extremities were most ar- 
tistically being rubbed up, the clerk at the 
office who received him, and the man w^ho 
supplied one of the pitchers of ice-water, came 
in, off duty, both of them, and the four en- 
gaged in a critical discussion of an article in 
the quarterly referred to, by Lowell or Emer- 
son, he forgets which. He learned afterward, 
with pride, that three of them were graduates 
of universities. 



COME. 27 

The great establishment is nearly as won- 
derful and noiseless as the machine it is named 
for. So nice an attention is given to details, 
and so wise a general providence extends over 
the whole, that it would seem an invisible 
grain of dust in a gudgeon of the coffee- 
grinder in the lower cellar story would occa- 
sion universal disorder. So perfect the man- 
agement that every wheel and pen and em- 
ploye seems inevitably and fatally absorbed 
with a particular duty, and indifferent to the 
work of every other. Of course there are 
exceptional occasions of misfortune, as for in- 
stance sometimes on a stormy Sunday in mid- 
winter, when the guests are all at home and 
weather-bound, a disaster will happen to the 
heating-apparatus, emptying the public rooms 
of the house, and filling the grates in all the 
chambers, as a frost will sometimes occur in 
June, huddling the poultry in the barn, and 
cutting off relentlessly the early cucumbers. 

I am too lazy to write, and I wish above 
all things you were here to see for yourself. 



28 HALF TINTS. 

Enjoy it you would, I know, ineffably. Your 
quick and penetrating sense would find ample 
opportunity for employment. Even as a "boy 
I remember you used to know what things 
meant and weighed, and that is a faculty not 
very apt to wear out or dull. Every day I see 
something I wish I had your old way of look- 
ing at from a dozen stand-points. You were 
always wise and broad, I neither nor ever. 
Your unerring observation and mathematical 
sense were never so acute or severe as to punc- 
ture or wound. If your fine brain measured 
to a hair and weighed to an atom, your human 
heart floated in the milk of human kindness. 
If you sometimes uttered in the freest way the 
most searching and unpalatable truths, they 
came in tones as rich and pure as the swing- 
ing oriole's. It is so easy to be mean, and so 
fi" hard to be generous in our judgments, that no 
wonder reflection makes us potter about form- 
ing them. Human nature is so bad, or so good, 
in a good or a bad place, that one who knows 
it will hesitate about too fine a sight upon it. 



COME. 29 

Alas, says Heine, one ought really to write 
against no one in this world. We are all of 
us sick and suffering enough in this great laza- 
retto. Many a piece of polemical writing 
reminded him, he says, of a revolting quarrel 
in a little hospital at Cracow, where he was 
an accidental spectator, and where it was ter- 
rible to hear the sick mocking and reviling 
each other's infirmities, how emaciated con- 
sumptives ridiculed those who were bloated 
with dropsy, how one laughed at a cancer in 
the nose of another, and he again jeered the 
locked jaws and distorted eyes of his neighbor, 
until finally those who were mad with fever 
sprang naked from bed, and tore the coverings 
and sheets from the maimed bodies around, 
and there was nothing to be seen but revolting 
misery and mutilation. 

During the major part o± a year or two 
my poor wife has been at a water-cure, and 
some twinges of my old injury from the falling 
grape-vine (you remember it, you rogue) hav- 
ing come back to me after an absence of some 



30 HALF TINTS. 

years, and inclining to linger, not letting me 
go out as often as I would, I have had plenty 
of time, in one great hotel and another, to 
look through and into them a little. If, in the 
haste of preparation, the flowing bowl be not 
suited to your palate, pray set it down to the 
absence of Mary the Second, the twinges afore- 
said, or my intimacy with Job. You never 
use lemon. 






III. 



THE UNIVERSE, 



III. 

THE UNIVERSE. 

I shall not take up your precious time 
with the mere materialities. Rich and elegant 
furniture and upholstery are now so common 
that a word to anybody about them would be 
carrying coals to Newcastle. The one un- 
usual and unfashionable thing, perhaps, is the 
strength of the chairs and sofas. A stout man, 
like yourself, need give himself no uneasiness 
about going through. And the beds, Jack, 
you would appreciate. They tempt apostro- 
phe. The airy mattresses, enveloped every day 
in fresh snowy linen, the folds as distinct as 
lines of latitude and longitude, close round old 

and young bodies alike, snugly and gently as 
2* 



34 HALF TINTS. 

sea-water. They are indeed respecters of per- 
sons. Soothing their touch as loving nurse, 
and all-pervading. As beds for bachelors, no 
suspicion can attach to them, and for men 
and their wives, no contest can occur for the 
disputed middle. So level my own, the cham- 
bermaid is puzzled always to know just when 
my wife visits me. 

As I said, the apparent general harmony 
will so strike you, that the machine will ap- 
pear to run of itself. But put an eye through 
its crystal covering, and you will be as forcibly 
struck with the consciousness of every part in 
its relation to every other and the whole. There 
is such fidelity and responsibility imposed upon 
every man and woman on the pay-rolls, that 
the work of each becomes inseparable from the 
work of every other. The eye single is an 
eye omniscient. A little signal strikes every 
ear as the touch of the key in an insignificant 
office alarms every operator on the line. The 
young man at the private door, who seems so 
mechanically to let persons in, keeping his 



THE UNIVERSE. 35 

place in a cheap story with, his thumb, would 
astonish you with his knowledge. So all the 
way through. The system of espionage is 
only so perfect as not to be seen. Every move- 
ment of every guest is observed, and every 
habit analyzed and accounted for. The know- 
ing man of the world will hardly deliberate a 
mischief in a hotel. What is not known is 
assumed, or guessed at, analogically. The sit- 
uation, doubtful or novel to the adventuring 
guest himself, is a common one to the observa- 
tion of the spy, who, groaning with his scuttle 
of coal, so obsequiously seems to avoid him. 
The purpose, perhaps hardly conceived by 
him, has time and again developed in the folly 
of others. Folly of any sort, especially con- 
traband, as you descend the scale of men, be- 
comes more apprehensible. Down very low 
in the virtues, so low as just to touch the line 
where the vices begin, the meaner faculties 
are found acutest. The mind's eye grows con- 
ical, as a rat's. Gross appetite and passion are 
known and read of all men ; the brutes that 



36 HALF TINTS. 

perish seem even to scent them. Pure prin- 
ciples and pure motives, in their exaltation, 
are invisible but in their effects. Into the 
translucent depths of goodness the bad eye 
never wanders ; but evil is in every vision, and 
reflects itself forever. But excuse flashes ; 
pyrotechnics for boys, refinements for sopho- 
mores. What goes up must come down. A 
plain word will say it better. All men are 
policemen to evil-doers, especially at hotels. 
Exposure is nearly inevitable. What the 
chambermaid doesn't know, the fireman can 
tell her. If the modest lady who arrived with 
the honest gentleman, by the evening boat, is 
not his cousin, the fact will be surely known 
at the office very early in the morning. 

Incident. Scene, office. Time, morning. 
Judge Finesse, a pure and distinguished cit- 
izen of one of our beautiful interior cities, has 
been spending a few days in town on profes- 
sional business. His stay at the great hotel 
has been peculiarly pleasant. Run to death 
at home with hard work, change of situation 



THE UNIVERSE. 37 

and associations and food has revived his en- 
ergies. The night has been refreshingly cool, 
after a very hot day, and the comfortable cham- 
ber he has occupied, fronting to the south, has 
received through its great windows the stim- 
ulating breezes. Later down than usual, he 
has hurried his breakfast a little not to miss a 
business engagement. Passing composedly 
through the office, the accomplished clerk, 
with remarkable blandness, addresses him: 
' Good-morning, good-morning, Judge. Hope 
you are well and comfortable. Charming day 
before us. Ah, by the way, Judge,' grasping 
his hand with regretful tenderness, and drop- 
ping his voice to gentle softness, 'how dis- 
tressing it is to blunder. Never told you your 
room was promised to an old guest ; time up 
this morning. Oh, excuse me, Judge; the 
lady in ISTo. — , on your floor ; you know her. 
Her room is not large enough for two by half. 
Sorry we can't accommodate her ; have to 
turn people off every day. Charming lady ; 
carriage ready. Early engagements annoying ; 



38 HALF TINTS. 

don't let me detain you. In town again, 
give us a call ; not always so crowded. Dis- 
tressing to blunder. 5 The Judge, a little 
disconcerted, was about to protest, when the 
amiable clerk, in a most graceful way, looking 
straight at the guest the while, crossed his 
lips significantly with a finger, and, after a 
moment's pause, bade the abused good man a 
final good morning. A line from Watts ran 
riot through the Judge's head as he rode down 
the street: Dangers stand thick through all 
the ground : and the same evening, at the 
sea-side, he was heard to express new views 
on the doctrine of special providences. 

Hotels used to be devoted to the accom- 
modation of travellers and temporary guests. 
The best rooms were reserved for them, and 
pains taken to please them. 'Now it is other- 
wise. They are mainly filled by people who 
live in them, and who possess their best com- 
forts. For the good treatment of persons who 
are only in the house for a few days, the man- 
agers take little or no special care. Unless 



THE UNIVERSE. 39 

the temporary guest be a lion, whose enter- 
tainment would advertise the establishment, 
or a spendthrift, to swell the extras, he is of 
too little consideration for personal attention. 
By the aid of devices, he may avoid a loft 
lodging or a bed in the court ; but the best 
accommodations can scarcely be had for affec- 
tion, favoritism, or money. As before said, 
the best comforts are permanently possessed, 
and for residents the great establishment is 
conducted. The treatment others receive is 
secondary and incidental. Especially the sys- 
tem of fees gives the former every advantage. 
Fees in top figures for ostensible charges, and 
fees for every thing, descending through all 
the gradations of service. Fees to the porter, 
who fees the proprietor for his license; fees 
to the boy who takes your umbrella and duster 
in the check-room, who pays a rental ; fees 
to the chambermaid, who modestly, and not 
at all suggestingly, tells you how mean are 
her wages, the housekeeper dividing the profits 
of her appealing eloquence ; fees to the fire- 



40 HALF TINTS. 

man, which, go to the aforesaid porter ; fees to 
the table-waiter, who came all the way from 
Ireland, who wasn't in the July riots, who 
never repeated a word he overheard at the 
table, who has a wife and seven children, one 
of them very small, please yonr honor, who 
gets all the best cuts, and never serves cold 
dishes, who always knows a gentleman by his 
kindness to servants, who would be stupid if 
he gave all you give him to his superior, who 
pays the big bonus for his office monthly ; fees 
for soap and water in the wash-room ; fees to 
the self-sacrificing genius who presides over 
the dressing-room, whose occupation is so un- 
wholesome; fees to the young man at the 
door of the dining-room, who tells you he is 
a detective, who has saved many a hat and 
coat to gentlemen who never gave him a shil- 
ling, but who has since watched the same hats 
and coats just the same as if each had given 
him a guinea ; fees to the boy in the reading- 
room, who never files the St. Louis papers till 
he sees the generous St. Louisan come in, who 



THE UNIVERSE. 41 

always gets the virgin reading ; fees, in short, 
for every thing, regular and extra, necessary 
and luxury, from office down to boot-room, 
from a bottle of "Widow Cliquot to a sheet of 
indispensable paper. The habitue, who knows 
all the springs, and which to touch, most effec- 
tually to get the best things and the best ser- 
vice, and who is willing and able to pay for 
them, will always of course command them. 
He stands in the position of regular customer 
to the patronized, and will get good attention 
when the few days' guest will be nearly neg- 
lected. The latter will soon be out of the 
house and gone forever. The other will re- 
main to give while his money or wind holds 
out. So, necessarily, the habitues pitch the 
tone and make the atmosphere of the place ; 
and with outline sketches of some of these it is 
my purpose to amuse you a little. To the 
many who are here from time to time, as at a 
railway station, because they must be, and are 
absorbed with matters to them greater than 
meat and drink and glitter for a day or two, 



42 HALF TINTS. 

what is here said may be as appropriate and 
interesting as to yon. 

[Yon want a nap ? Yery well. Pnt aside 
yonr pipe. Poise yonrself in yonr easy-chair. 
Oh, the valne of a good conscience. Never 
mind the falling mannscript. Yon can pick 
it np when yon wake. I go ont to ride with 
the proprietor. Livery-men are so kind, hotel- 
keepers need not keep carriages. Strange they 
are so liberal, considering the tronble they are 
pnt to by orders. Orders, orders, orders. In 
a single day a score of orders for plain car- 
riages for shopping in the morning ; a score 
for open baronches in the afternoon ; a score 
for close coupes in the evening ; all from the 
one hotel whose proprietor and book-keepers 
and clerks are dead-heads. And the high 
prices for feed. The good-natnred stable-man. 
He never tells his wrongs. Fonnd never help 
who never wonld his wounds impart, Spenser 
says.] 



IV. 



LITTLE ONES. 



TV. 

LITTLE ONES. 

Nor shall I waste your time by more than 
alluding to the many boys and girls just com- 
ing to manhood and womanhood. Yealy and 
irresponsible, they are here without their op- 
tion. Thoughtless or thoughtful parents have 
brought them here and pay the scores. They 
are innocent and beautiful. Youth is always 
beautiful. You might sigh for them ; but you 
forget who sighed for you. "We all must see 
the folly of it. 

Scene. Breakfast-room. Two fragrant 
youths have just sat down. One of them, 
the more pretentious, drawls wearily : ' Fash- 
ionable life laboweous. Will Lent never come ? 



46 HALF TINTS. 

Monday niglit a german at Mrs. Brown's, 
Tuesday night a german at Mrs. Smith's, last 
night a german at Mrs. Obscew's. Lattah 
vewy laboweous. Only eight couples ; twelve 
the happy numbaw.' Omelet discussed. Prac- 
tising on the servant, the young man grows 
sprightly and patronizing. ' Oawge,' he 
drawls again, less wearily ; ' do you know 
Miss Peachblow? I saw her on the avenue 
as I came in. Eawther pooty at times.' 

Scene, an hour later. Music-room. Three 
pretty young girls, and one not so young nor 
pretty, with flat curls round her temples, who 
seems to be matronizing, announces pleasantly : 
' Lecture to-night, girls, I see, by Miss Dick- 
inson.' ' Indeed,' responds one of the pretty 
three, 'Miss Wickerson. Want to know. 
Wonder if she has a waterfall.' 

You are a human fellow, Jack, and will 
be astonished when I tell you children do not 
abound in these places. An honest natural 
man regards them as the best fruits of mar 
riage. Not to have them I know you would 



LITTLE ONES. 47 

consider a calamity. You needn't stop read- 
ing to count on your fingers your own posses- 
sions in that line. I know in a general way 
your severe ideas of duty, and have no doubt 
of their fullest realization. Tour old-fashioned 
conscientious habits extend no doubt to family 
matters as to all others. Tou know by heart 
that radical old orthodox sermon of poor Yor- 
ick, which Trim read so divinely to Uncle 
Toby, Walter Shandy, and Dr. Slop, while 
Obadiah was gone for the forceps, and no 
doubt you religiously illustrate in all your life 
its concise summing up : Trust that man in 
nothing who has not a conscience in every 
thing. But times have changed, and ortho- 
doxy is not so muscular, nor ethics so compen- 
dious. Life is constantly developing new 
uses. A little while ago the theories of Mal- 
thus were considered impious or ridiculous. 
jSTot so now. Their practicability is so far 
established as to be somewhat realized. At 
first blush it would appear anomalous that a 
hundred or two wives and husbands should 



48 HALF TINTS. 

from year to year eat, drink, and be merry, 
and bear no ostensible blessings. But the 
world moves, and progress has defined respon- 
sibilities. Essentially eclectic and practical, 
society has seized and adopted the best rules 
of all the sciences. Political economy has 
been ransacked, and its best truths appropri- 
ated. So much to do in this world, and so 
little time to do it in, that inevitably there 
must be a division of labor. Classes for every 
thing, and individuals for every class. Many 
cooks are sure to spoil the broth. To do any 
one thing well it must absorb the life. Your 
stupid Yorkshireman, imported with your love- 
ly Durhams, feeds and curries and combs with 
a zeal and energy that your scholarly boy Ben- 
jamin carries into his search for Latin and 
Hebrew roots. Nothing, you must know, is so 
absorbing as fashionable life. Balls and calls 
and parties and operas and shopping leave 
little time for any thing else. Nothing you 
can imagine could be so embarrassing to a life 
of gayety as children. If by any mischance 



LITTLE ONES. 49 

or miscalculation such an incumbrance accrues, 
the interest in the most brilliant and enchant- 
ing festivities can be only qualified and alloyed. 
Nurses, most trustworthy, fortunately, can be 
obtained ; but the mother, notwithstanding, 
cannot withdraw her mind wholly from her 
offspring. The success of her friend's magnifi- 
cent entertainment would be disparaged in pro- 
portion to her uneasiness and anxiety. Besides, 
the dress-maker's patterns are not adapted to 
such exceptions. The rules of tape and scissors 
are remorseless. Artistic proportions must be 
preserved. (Just here you will recall Sydney 
Smith's alliteration of diameter and derision.) 
Stays and devices do much, but cannot do 
every thing. The form, paradoxically, must be 
fitted to the mould. Out of fashion out of the 
world. And delays would be dangerous. Out 
of sight out of mind. The lists of friends 
would be revised, and a chance would occur 
of being left off. So, Jack, you see how it is. 
Look closely into the proprieties and the ab- 
surdity will not be more apparent than the 



50 HALF TINTS. 

necessity. Imagine a mother living on such 
sweets and spices as fashion furnishes. Her 
thin blood would he as distasteful to the hun- 
gry cherub as its persistent grasping at the 
diamond ear-bobs would be annoying. No, 
no. The tastes and requirements of gayety 
and maternity are incongruous. Life to be 
effective must be kept simple. Fashion is ex- 
acting, and will not let her votaries divide or 
suspend their worship. ' Babies/ she says, 
oracularly, ' are vulgar. They are trouble- 
some, and spoil the shape. My dears, do bet- 
ter with your lives. Keep your charms, and 
display them not at home. Encourage the 
beautiful ; the useful encourages itself. Adorn 
and glitter. Tempt flatteries and live on them. 
Sleep till you cease to dream ; dance till you 
die.' And they dare not question nor demur. 
The sweet boy, who nearly cost his mother's 
life, must be put away. Her life is too pre- 
cious to be given to him for whom it was saved. 
Once a day or once a week is as often as she 
can see him. She must not stop in the dance 



LITTLE OSTES. 51 

to think if he is well and warm and sleeping. 
Resign him she must to the purchased mercy 
of the stranger-woman, and risk her future 
and his forever. 

[Dear lunatic Lamb. You remember his 
famous toast, after having been plagued all 
the morning by noisy children : To the mem- 
ory of the much-abused and much-calumniated 
good Bang Herod.] 

But poodles, let me say, are admissible. 
They are thought to possess the requisite 
merits without any of the drawbacks. Some 
employment must be had for the affections, 
which the dear things appreciate as much as 
infants, without being so exacting. Down out 
of the realm of bewildering pleasure, 'tis sweet 
to hear the poodle's honest welcome. Re- 
leased from the intoxicating atmosphere of 
music and beauty and perfumes, 'tis refresh- 
ing to unlock the sources of feeling, and let 
the tender emotions unrestrainedly gather 
about an object worthy of them. Such de- 
lightful dalliance composes the thoughts and 



52 HALF TINTS. 

cushions the nerves. The most desperate can- 
not always dance. The best-ribbed body will 
not always bear the stays. The eye must 
weary with the dazzling diamonds. The most 
flexible face must relax or the empty smile 
would fasten. The lambent tongue must some- 
times lay its length in stillness. The ear would 
sicken with perpetual flattery. The brain would 
soften without the sweet pillow. All the dis- 
traction and dizziness of a fashionable career 
may be perfectly soothed away by an occa- 
sional hour of gushing caressing. The heart- 
rending sobs of poor dear King Charles are 
kissed away, and he forgets his desolation in 
the lonely chamber. He believes all the vows 
which are made to him in these hours of par- 
oxysmal fondness. His voice of murmur dies 
out, and their hearts go together like the clouds 
of the morning. (Brainerd testifies that he 
saw two of them tinged with the rising sun ; 
that in the dawn they floated on and mingled 
into one.) 

So doth all nature illustrate itself. The 



LITTLE ONES. 53 

angels, for relaxation, are said to leave their 
blissful abodes to whisper their heavenly trifles 
into the ears of sleeping and smiling innocence 
on earth. Byron is described by his fellow- 
poet as standing on the Alps and on the Ap- 
penines, and with the thunder talking as friend 
to friend, and in sportive twist weaving a gar- 
land of the lightning's fiery wing ; as laying 
his hand upon the ocean's mane, and playing 
familiar with his hoary locks ; and then turn- 
ing and with the grasshopper, who sang his 
evening song, conversing. 

At home the brilliant Seraphina can have 
her dear King Charles always with her. The 
rules do not exclude him from the eating-rooms 
as they do the babies. A chair is drawn out 
for him, and the bill of fare is searched for 
bits suitably delicious for his palate. Great 
care is taken with his diet, as do all that they 
can they cannot make him drink Kissingen 
or Vichy. His breath must be sweet and fra- 
grant to be fit to mix with his loving Sera- 
phina's. White meat, breast of the chicken, is 



54 HALF TINTS. 

found best suited, in all climates and latitudes, 
to the stomach of the delicate animal ; with 
sweet cream, of course, for dessert. 

Incident. Time, midnight. The Universe 
announced to be oil fire. All the perfect appa- 
ratus in the house and out of it soon operating. 
In the midst of the excitement and terror, com- 
ing down the stairway, is seen the affectionate 
Seraphina, with her poor helpless King Charles 
'pon her bosom. A little later comes the 
nurse with the baby ; an obscurity and almost 
a secret till that dreadful midnight. The fruit, 
of course, of honest wedlock, but tabooed. 



V. 



TABLE D'HOTE. 



TABLE D'HdTE. 

I suppose, in your busy life with liead and 
hands, it has never occurred to you that any con- 
siderable number of persons could be brought 
together, especially in America, whose regular 
and earnest occupation would seem to be to 
eat. The maxim inculcated in our boyhood, 
eat to live, not live to eat, was accepted as the 
summary of all table wisdom. In those days 
the early morning meal was soon dispatched 
that the serious work of the day might be com- 
menced. And serious work it was, I often 
think, for our fathers, single handed and alone, 
to attack with their axes the unbroken forest, 
to make for themselves homes and independ- 
ence. Looking over the now smiling and fruit- 



58 HALF TINTS. 

ful fields and orchards and vineyards, the toil 
and heroism which produced them seem in- 
credible. Indeed, incredible it all seems to 
me now ; for, accustomed to see but the stunted 
shrubs which struggle up through the granite 
streets, it is impossible to realize the grandeur 
of the old trees, with their great roots and 
branches interlocked in the black soil and blue 
sky. . I remember, lying on our backs, how 
the trooping clouds seemed just to brush their 
tops. A squirrel up there defied the rifle. 
And the majestic oak we used reverently to 
guess the age and height of, joining hands 
with Mary and Eliza and taking the old fel- 
low in our arms. His tremendous fall during 
the memorable storm seemed for a moment to 
still even the thunder. Such an old monarch 
must have supplied the sublime image of Read 
in his poem on the death of Webster : 

The great are falling from us, one by one, 
As fall the patriarchs of the forest trees ; 

The winds shall seek them vainly, and the sun 
Shine on each vacant space for centuries. 



TAELE D'HOTE. 59 

In those heroic days, plain food, in suffi- 
cient quantity, was all that was required. The 
appetite was kept whetted by labor, and di- 
gestion was as easy and unconscious as respira- 
tion. Sandwiches of corn-bread and bacon, 
with the fallen tree for a table, untouched and 
unpolished but by the winds of heaven, and 
the glittering axe for a platter, brighter than 
the brightest silver, made a delicious and bril- 
liant dinner for the pioneer, after six honest 
hours of woodman's gymnastics. His simple 
and earnest life was ever a song or a prayer. 
The present was all thankfulness and the fu- 
ture all hope. His daily enjoyments, dearly 
and honestly earned, were twice paid for and 
blessed in health and sweet conscience by the 
Master Employer. His title to the acres he 
opened to the sun was directly from their 
Creator ; and the bread they brought him was 
the sweat of his own face. His future, in 
the steady serenity of heroic faith, appeared 
abounding in only such promises as his fidel- 
ity and devotion entitled him to realize. His 



60 HALF TINTS. 

work and wants were so simple as ever to keep 
him close to the Giver. There was no middle- 
man to divide his blessings or qualify his 
thanksgiving. His health the Helper, and his 
will the Assurance, his own short arm was 
long enough to reach the Bountiful and Ever- 
lasting. 

But here, where reluctant exercise, and lit- 
tle of that, is substituted for inspiring labor, 
the appetite is dull and weary, and genius 
must be called in to assist it. The old maxim 
being reversed, and one of the essential means 
of life made to become its one engrossing end, 
nature, in her simple ways, is superseded, and 
art, with her endless arts, substituted. Like a 
lie, once told, forever and everywhere challen- 
ging the truth to combat it, this violence to 
nature must entail its consequences. From 
daylight till midnight the table is always 
spread, and the ends of the earth and the 
bottom of the sea are hunted to keep it sup- 
plied. The cook, once self-taught and ready- 
made, has become a professor and a philoso- 



61 

plier. His libraries exhaust the sciences, and 
his genius pervades latitudes and elements. 
The names and constituency of his dishes are 
set down in encyclopaedias. (Jerrold's Hermit 
of Bellyful is hardly an exaggeration or cari- 
cature.) So many and novel his inventions 
that only the resources of arithmetic and the 
study of new languages would enable you to 
count and pronounce them. To France the 
world is indebted for most of this kitchen wis- 
dom, as well as for most of the refinements in 
vice and philosophy, and her language adheres 
to it as tenaciously as it does to them. If we 
accept her definitions of morals, and submit to 
her guidance in matters which reach beyond 
this life, we ought not to hesitate about adopt- 
ing the names she has given to her culinary 
inventions. France, you know, is the stand- 
ard of civilization, and you run a great risk of 
being considered vulgar if you do not know 
her language. The English, in America, is a 
very common language, and is mostly used 
by common people and natives. It answers 



62 HALF TINTS. 

well enough, for ordinary uses, but must be 
abandoned as advancement is made in social 
standing. For prosperous people, even, who 
have yet the scent of labor about them, it may 
answer ; but when their probation of obeisance 
and disinfection is ended ; when their new 
birth of elegance and aristocracy is forgiven, 
and they are fully admitted into the charmed 
circle, they are presumed to have forgotten 
the vulgar vernacular which sold their soap 
and their poisons, their stocks and their lies, 
and to have adopted the chosen language of 
courts and civilization. So be very careful at 
table to give the French names to the dishes 
you ask for. The flunkeys and fine ladies and 
fine gentlemen will not laugh at you, nor for a 
moment suspect you are a useful man. 

In the eating department, Jack, you will 
be amused at the ambition which prevails to 
be late at breakfast. The man who leaves his 
bed early is suspected of earnest purposes. 
You will find the best people, whose excel- 
lence is determined by their having nothing 



63 

to do, are late risers. By the time the ma- 
jority of the world have earned their dinners, 
the grandees carelessly lounge into the break- 
fast-room, and the respectable hour of meeting 
each other is there and thereafter a matter of 
pride and congratulation. . 

But dinner is the event of the day, and the 
achievement of life. It is anticipated as a 
fete, dressed for as an entertainment, lingered 
over as a luxury, and discussed as the thing 
of life to live for. Eyes beam, diamonds glit- 
ter, laces flutter, till you would think all the 
ladies maidens just married, and all the men 
Apollos and bridegrooms. If their lips speak 
wisdom it will be of the banquet and its par- 
takers. The meats and vegetables are so artis- 
tically ripened that mastication is easy and 
digestion half accomplished, and ample time 
and opportunity are given to discuss the guests 
as well as the dishes. To know just how many 
ingredients make up the soup, just how long 
since the halibut was captured, just how many 
days the beef has lain on the ice, just the time 



64 HALF TINTS. 

since the pheasant was winged in your prairie, 
is not information at all inconsonant with con- 
jectures as to the genuineness of the diamonds 
and laces of the lady opposite, as to the gains 
and losses in stocks of Mr, Breezy, at the other 
end of the table, as to the probable result of 
the flirtation between Miss Rosy and the bril- 
liant Colonel, or as to the chances of the too 
conscious lady in pink at the left of the gen- 
tleman with side-whiskers being his bride or 
his sweetheart, or his wife or another's. 

The stout gentleman in a low waistcoat, 
mixing his salad so abstractedly and artistically, 
would be a study for you. His obedient and 
handy servant is kept busy supplying materials. 
The lettuce, by the good diner, is carefully 
culled and examined, to see that no disgusting 
bug is hidden away between the suspicious 
leaves. The eggs are boiled to the happy hard- 
ness. The caster is exhausted for condiments 
and appetizers, and still the poor servant is 
kept busy supplying the artist's wants. All 
the while the good lord of the stomach is 



65 

patient and absorbed and occupied. The sweet 
napkins are flaked about him and upon him, 
under his chin, over his knees, on his left, on 
his right, before his eyes. His calmness is the 
serenity of an astronomer looking up a new 
planet. The requisite salt to the infinitesimal 
of a grain is meted out, the red and black 
pepper mathematically proportioned, the acid 
and oil measured to a drop, and the whole is 
chopped up and sugared till the result in the 
dish looks so perfectly mixed as if indeed there 
had once been employed upon it all the chem- 
istry of nature. 

And the little woman with the blue face 
and twisted nose and big diamond would inter- 
est you as much. To see her go through the 
bill of fare you would think she had just 
escaped with her life from a respectable board- 
ing-house. Double portions of every thing, 
and rapidly disappearing. She is a mystery 
and a wonder. My poor wife, invalid that 
she is, with little interest in this fading world, 
has watched her with absorbing interest, and 



66 HALF TINTS. 

finds in her gastronomic enthusiasm and 
achievements an incentive to live to know the 
result of her prodigious industry. Go when 
you will into the spacious saloons devoted to 
eating, you will always find her. Early and 
late and all the time at breakfast, sitting 
through the whole hour devoted to luncheon, 
at the plebeian's early dinner, at the later state 
banquet, at tea, silently and insatiably, and at 
supper at midnight, with raw oysters, cold 
chicken, a pitcher of milk, and olives, just for 
a nightcap, as she facetiously and felicitously 
calls them, at the same time bearing a hungry 
eye on the smoking stew of a passenger by the 
midnight train. 

And you would be not less interested in 
observing the select gentlemen who always 
occupy the table directly in range of the main 
entrance. Their leisurely indifference and 
repose are not less remarkable 'than their 
practis-ed habits of observation. Possibly one 
of them, with the buttoned coat, younger than 
the rest, may have blushed sometime within a 



TABLE D'HOTE. 67 

decade, as his eye has an adventuring hesitancy 
denoting occasional introspection. His look is 
not quite a stare, and his eye seems of shorter 
range than the rifled brasses about Mm. His 
glances, compared with theirs, have a random 
unsteadiness, as -occasional shots which precede 
or follow a volley. But he seems ashamed of 
his little remnant of modesty, and no doubt in 
time will achieve the envied effrontery. When 
he forgets that his mother was a woman, and 
once was married, he will as indecently discuss 
a bride as any of his accomplished compan- 
ions. His eye in company with theirs will 
follow and fasten upon her with an eagerness 
and a tenacity in proportion to the pain of her 
embarrassment. And if looks fall short of 
perfectly torturing the shrinking innocent, his 
pitiless words will audibly accompany theirs 
to complete her misery. Poor hesitating con- 
sciousness ; how it staggers and falls back be- 
fore this faculty of gossips. They know every 
poor woman's coat of mail, and strike hardest 
where she is most unprotected and sensitive. 



68 HALF TINTS. 

But heartily they love a shining mark of art- 
lessness for skilful practice. The veterans of 
watering-places and public amusements, who 
have withstood the searching gaze of elegant 
idlers and roues for untold seasons, they know 
to be iron-clad and impenetrable. They pre- 
fer not to dull their daggers upon callousness, 
but to keep them bright and whetted for such 
as are yet a little tender. The shrinking gives 
a relish, and pure blood is fragrant. My wife, 
Jack, is the most amiable woman in the world, 
but she will sometimes lose her temper with 
these philosophers. While they sit as easily as 
in a restaurant, with their bottles of wine osten- 
tatiously ranged before them, surveying com- 
placently the dining-room to find some new 
object for discussion, her tongue, in spite of 
her, will sometimes quicken into eloquent in- 
dignation. If I would naturally smile at their 
sublime conceit, the energy of my wife's de- 
nunciation still more excites my admiration; 
and for this splendid reminder of her old 
brilliancy, I am quite willing to forgive them. 



TABLE D ? HOTE. 69 

May they sit while they live, as they have sat 
since The Universe opened, at the same well- 
served and conspicuous table, and may they 
never have wives to blush for their immodesty 
and uncharitableness. 



VI. 



DRAWING-ROOM. 



VI. 

DRAWING-ROOM. 

That last glass of Burgundy, Jack, went 
right to the spot, and the cordial and coffee 
fastened it. The spinal column is stiffened 
prodigiously, and the twinge has departed. 
My dear boy, let us be in fashion, and saunter 
through the halls and lounge in the parlors a 
while, just to assist the generous dinner. And 
Job will accompany us. How brilliant every 
thing is. And the ladies, how radiant and 
charming. Many of the most beautiful, and 
all of the most desperate of the guests are to 
be met with at this hour. Some gay fellows, 
who live mysteriously, who dress showily, who 
know the town and everybody, who talk 

4 



74 HALF TINTS. 

stocks and horses and sonnets and French, who 
are not guests, but who seem perfectly at 
home, are to be met with also. Of course, in 
such a brilliant assemblage, you will find a 
sprinkling of widows. They seek these gay 
scenes to forget their sorrows and temper their 
woes. Tour kindly observant eye will detect 
them by the shadows which linger upon them, 
and by the touching sadness which restrains 
their smiles and mellows their voices. "Widow- 
hood is so interesting that I once told my wife 
that I could -think of but one woman in the 
world who would not be rendered more attrac- 
tive by it ; at which remark she smiled so 
sweetly as to incline me to question even the 
one exception ; but observing that the little suf- 
ering darling seemed for the moment endued 
with new hopes of health and life, I upbraided 
myself for entertaining the impious shadow of 
a doubt, and determined repentantly to put it 
away forever. If they sometimes appear a 
trifle too gay, it must be accounted for by the 
general pressure of their afflictions. The human 



DKAWDTGKR00M. 75 

heart is happily so constituted that every 
weight will not always keep it down. It 
has an affinity for zephyrs and sunshine, and 
will sometimes float up to the rippling surface. 
The same machinery which crushes out tears 
of bitterness, distils delicious nectar. You 
know how Burns puts it : 

Chords which vibrate sweetest pleasure, 
Thrill the deepest notes of woe. 

It were a wonder if Job, considering his 
desolate life of celibacy, had not some spice 
of asceticism ; but no human being ever heard 
him whisper a disparaging word of the sor- 
rowing widows. If any one class of men more 
than another be attracted by them, it is that 
unfortunate one which has always suffered for 
the want of that sweet use of the emotions 
which widowhood mourns. They are mutually 
attracted and mutually sympathize. They meet 
upon common ground, and naturally mingle 
their woes. In the solace of companionship 
are compounded all losses and all wants. The 



76 HALF TINTS. 

saddest memories are dissipated by coveted 
substitution, and the long-suffering topes are 
sublimed in fruition. If the satirical world 
sometimes laughs at the companionship, the 
spirits of just men and lost sweethearts rejoice 
over it. If there be one transcendent cause 
of ecstasy to departed husbands revisiting these 
earthly shades of trial and affliction, or one 
enduring, unexpressed desire of happy wives 
to make them wish to linger in them, it may 
be found in the final happiness of mourning 
consorts and sighing lovers. Goldsmith, of all 
the poets, is Job's admiration ; but he never 
praises the Traveller or the Deserted Tillage 
without a qualifying allusion to an ill-natured 
passage in the Citizen of the "World. That 
stain upon the fair fame of the immortal 
Goldy will too readily occur to you ; and you 
have no doubt wished a thousand times you 
could blot it out. A poor widow had, in a 
moment of paroxysmal grief, declared she 
would never marry till the earth was dry 
over her husband's grave. A sober second 



DRAWING-BOOM. 77 

thought naturally soon occurring to her, the 
poet describes her at the fresh mound, with a 
great fan in each hand, heroically summoning 
all the breezes to hasten her happiness. 

Some of these unfortunates are reported 
fabulously rich, which does not seem to dis- 
courage attentions. Even the mysterious gen- 
tlemen referred to, who kindly contribute their 
presence and charms at this hour, seem rather 
to seek than to avoid them. As a class they 
unselfishly go about doing good, and humanely 
take a hand in lifting, wherever found, the 
superincumbent burdens of humanity. It 
would warm your heart to see with what dis- 
interestedness they turn from other and more 
grateful services to smile away the shadows 
which linger upon these desolate ones. Them- 
selves cheerful and happy, and perfectly free 
from material burdens, they naturally seek to 
illumine the dark passages of those who are 
oppressed and despairing. The distresses of 
widowhood, with the cares of wealth super- 
added, have the need of the sweet sympathies 



78 HALF TINTS. 

which places of this sort so conveniently sup- 
ply. Notwithstanding, the sorrowing creatures 
seem reluctant to yield their tenacious fidelity 
to cherished memories and investments, since 
all the efforts of importunate and sympathizing 
suitors fail to entangle them into new alliances. 
They linger from year to year in these haunts 
of pleasure, and hear continually the gushing 
vows of devotion, and still remain obstinately 
wedded to their desolation and cares. 

The graceful creature just now acknowl- 
edging the reluctant compliment of the gen- 
tleman with eye-glasses, has made for years the 
tour of the watering-places, and has the same 
touching serenity of inconsolableness which 
she displayed so meekly when I saw her at 
Newport the summer my wife and I made our 
first visit. She passes yet for twenty-five, so 
gently has time dealt with her graces of person 
and character. How many tempting offers of 
affection and protection she must have declined 
in that time. Many a noble man, no doubt, 
has generously proposed to employ all her 



DRAWING-ROOM. 79 

wasting wealth of affection and resources. 
Still slie has refused to be comforted and re- 
lieved. So morbid her emotions have become, 
that the temptations of love and assurances of 
good guardianship cannot seduce her. And 
so selfish and narrow have her griefs and cares 
made her, that she cannot see that in declining 
an offer of love and sacrifice, she has lost an 
opportunity of making at least one human 
being happy and independent. 

Yery awkward meetings occur sometimes 
in these scenes of promiscuous gayety. Job 
tells of one peculiarly so. Passing through 
the brilliant throng one evening, he felt a gen- 
tle touch on the arm, and turning round, dis- 
covered his attention was arrested by one of 
the most beautiful and attractive of the guests, 
for some years a wife, who begged softly to 
know if he knew the gentleman who was just 
taking leave of his friend a few yards off. 
Answering that he did not, the faithful spouse 
was kind enough to tell him why she had 
asked. She said, with a smile of satisfaction 



80 HALF TINTS. 

which she seemed unwilling to suppress, that 
she had met the gentleman two or three times 
in the street, and that his eyes had followed 
her round the corner in a way to denote a 
question whether his feet might not follow her 
also. The humor of the thing was her excuse 
for troubling him with the inquiry and the 
reason for making it. Her being misunder- 
stood was such an amusing achievement that 
she would like to know the sagacious fellow, 
that was all. 

The contrasts everywhere apparent would 
interest you. Extremes jostle each other per- 
petually. An honest young couple, just mar- 
ried, engrossed with themselves and the sweet 
relation they have just entered, will be di- 
rectly followed in the promenade by a man 
and a woman, who, if they have known mar- 
riage, have only known it to degrade and dis- 
grace it. The manly clean-minded bridegroom 
and the maidenly angelic bride are a study 
and a joke to those who have survived if they 
ever felt the consummate bliss of love and 



DEAWING-EOOM. 81 

purity united. The hymeneal hopes and long- 
ings of the ardent and trusting couple are one 
by one guessed up and gibed at as perishing 
materialities. The nuptial enjoyments, so 
sacred to delicacy and darkness that a taper 
even would not shine upon them, are invaded 
and glared upon by these satyrs. The dreams 
which vault over to-day and its trivialities 
into to-morrow of benedictions and grandeur, 
are exhausted of the spirit of poesy and 
prayer, and dwarfed to the measure of disap- 
pointment and infidelity. The sanctified pas- 
sion which so confidingly and trustingly links 
them together, and so perfectly attunes their 
aspirations and raptures, is disgustingly per- 
verted, and made to bear the sins of men and 
of animals. The glitter and array which to 
the tender lovers seem an atmosphere of sub- 
limation, have but sharpened the human sense 
of the scoffing realists to anatomic accuracy. 
The glowing mountains of promise, wrapped in 
rainbows and reaching to heaven are speculated 
upon as the delusive mirage of inspiring lust. 

4* 



82 HALF TINTS. 

But there. How beautiful that other 
contrast. Admire it as you would a rain- 
bow, with the glow which a hearty kinship 
with all the world kindles. Those two lovely 
girls floating by. Each perfectly beautiful, 
and perfectly contrasting. Noiseless as spring 
sunshine, and as inspiring. They fill the 
eye and the mind's eye, and you only gaze. 
You are as much lost in the vision as poet 
in his dream or saint in his prayer. A per- 
fect blonde and a perfect brunette, distinct, 
together, and blending. Raven hair and 
golden, rippling at random and flowing to- 
gether. Blue eyes and black, as you look at 
them, alternating, and confusing your fancies, 
like the changing hues of a sunset. They 
fascinate and subdue you, whatever your own 
eyes or nature. Complexions, nut-brown and 
alabaster, warm and roseate with innocency 
and ripeness. Figures so perfectly matched 
in size, style, and movement, as to appear 
inseparable. Both of them adorned in har- 
mony with nature. Colors .and fabrics not less 



DRAWING-EOOM. 83 

adapted to unity than to contrast. What 
nature and art needed to mate each of them 
perfect is gained by putting them together. 
If any thing so beautiful under the sun, cer- 
tainly nothing so ravishing under the gas-light. 
Blessed accidents which bring them together 
so often at this hour. Happy miracles which 
set them down so often upon the public prom- 
enade together. 

Not much less beautiful the good woman 
of threescore who is now talking with them. 
Her complexion is as clear and her face almost 
as sunny as theirs. That glistening silver lock 
must but a moment since have turned gray 
while she unconsciously twisted it. Her voice 
and smile and eyes do not answer to so much 
of life and vicissitude. The three sympathize 
and mingle without shock or discordance. 

Now let us especially observe the group of 
middle-aged women comfortably and compos- 
edly seated in the left-hand corner. They are 
as complacent as if no trouble ever came to 
any one in this world, and as assured as if all 



84 HALF TINTS. 

the world must come to them for counsel. 
They are perfect types of their class. They 
have lived so long in public places, and so 
long devoted themselves to externals, that they 
have ceased to be attentive to * their own 
thoughts and lives. Living wholly by their 
senses, the power of reflection is lost by dis- 
use. Their instinctive habit of scenting the 
motives of others has left them no time to 
consider their own. Always in a crowd and 
always exposed, they have grown sharp as the 
younger "Weller in the school of London streets. 
Accustomed to colors in all their tints and 
combinations, they criticise even the summer 
clouds. "Without domestic occupations and 
cares, their only resource is to watch the vary- 
ing surface of life about them. Good natural 
eyes often seem able to turn round corners, 
but theirs make the circuit of square ones 
unerringly and without difficulty. The slight- 
est suggestion will let loose their whole pack 
of senses in pursuit. To them every act has 
its correspondent, as the freaks of the winds 



DRAWING-EOOM. 85 

tell themselves in tlie roar of the chimney. 
The only use of life which their careless lives 
of idleness have permitted them to know is 
amusement. A life of usefulness, if they could 
apprehend it, would appear to them a paradox. 
A life of consecration to duties so serious and 
absorbing as to employ every energy and emo- 
tion, and leave no time for such trifling as they 
live for, would seem a dreamer's fiction. The 
illustrious Howard, who visited Rome ' under 
such a despotic consciousness of duty as to re- 
fuse himself time for surveying the magnifi- 
cence of its ruins,' must be to them as much a 
myth as Jupiter. 

Only occasionally are found in combination 
the qualities and faculties suited to this kind 
of life. The majority of women would be as 
unhappy in it as in a toy-factory. To them it 
would be empty and wearisome, as they could 
find no employment for their better virtues. 
The polished surfaces dazzle the eye but do 
not warm the heart. If they do not weary 
they fascinate, and fascination never brought 



86 HALF TINTS. 

a tear. Its expression is the glitter of an icy 
summit. An analysis of a character satisfied 
and delighted with such a life would be inter- 
esting and instructive. The faculties and ac- 
quirements which express themselves in perfect 
taste are all there, but the fine sensibilities and 
affections which are perpetually reaching, as 
the tentacles of the coral, and yearning to 
apprehend or convert the wasting or per- 
verted attributes of human nature, would be 
found wanting. The flower which is most 
effective for adornment is of another soil and 
culture than that which discovers itself by its 
fragrance. 

The group is just now excited unusually. 
A rare scene for its eyes and tongue is before 
it. You might see these women often with- 
out observing so much interest in their faces. 
Their ordinary expression is indifference. Gam- 
blers and the bad of their own sex only have 
it more uniformly and perfectly. But their 
studied lineaments seem now to forget their 
training. The paroxysm has exposed new lines 



DRAWING-BOOM. 87 

and wrinkles, as a thaw makes visible every 
treacherous crack in the frozen surface. They 
are discussing a mother and daughter from the 
interior of the State, on their way to the front 
to nurse a brave son and brother, wounded in 
one of the bloody battles of the Rebellion. 
The stricken ones are attired in such plain 
garments as their home supplied, but which 
so outrage the laws of harmony in colors, as 
to make them a spectacle to these artists. The 
countrywomen, as they are called, are scanned 
from head to foot, and every article of dress is 
the subject of a brilliant joke. The observers 
imagine the Paris milliners laughing them- 
selves sick at such funny bonnets. They re- 
member to have seen just such shoes when 
they were children, said to have been worn by 
their grandmothers. The tucks set them won- 
dering how many persons may have worn the 
queer old-fashioned dresses, and to how many 
more, painstaking housewifery may yet adapt 
them before they reach the rag-bag. And 
their waists are natural, suggesting an utter 



88 HALF TINTS, 

ignorance of all the ingenious machinery of 
the shops. They wonder what ' such people ' 
can find to do, without the labor and anxiety 
of dressing. Ah, little do they dream of 
those earnest lives. The moments till the 
boat starts are counted by throbs. Thoughts 
of the wounded soldier make a tumult in 
their hearts. The mother has carried him in 
her bosom through the vicissitudes of half her 
life, and would not let him go till the Repub- 
lic called for him. Tenderly as her affections 
gather about him, he is no longer hers, but 
the country's. The loss to both she feels in 
his probable death. Her life has been so use- 
ful and devoted as to attach her to every 
neighbor and every citizen, and has made her 
unconsciously a hearty patriot. If her eyes 
could see the impertinence she excites, she 
would pity it. Blank as her gaze appears to 
them, it is fixed upon the mangled body under 
the bloody sheet in the busy hospital. If her 
mind could dwell a moment upon the empty 
splendor about her, she would blush at her 



DKAWIKGKROOM. 89 

weakness and infidelity. Her hands are un- 
used to rest in idleness, and feel to her as 
awkward as they look to the serene idlers. 
Will her boy survive to see the Republic tri- 
umphant ? "Will the cause demand her other 
boy also as a sacrifice ? Thy will, God of 
Justice, be done. 



VII. 



GENTLEMEN'S PARLOR. 



YII. 

GENTLEMEN'S PARLOK. 

The gentlemen's parlor after dinner is 
sometimes interesting. I see it is attractive 
now. Take an easy-chair, Jack, and give it 
an hour. And let me suggest that yon keep 
command of your face. To enjoy it you must 
take the tone of gravity which prevails. And 
summon all your good-nature, for tlie pleasure 
of the scene will half be lost if viewed severely. 
It will sufficiently satirize itself without assist- 
ance. 

The club of self-admirers and self-exalters 
is in session. It would be hard to find a half- 
dozen more comfortable-looking gentlemen. A 
majority, of course, are bachelors. So much 



94 HALF TINTS. 

sleekness and complacency and gravity in the 
same number of married men would be unac- 
countable. Too many drafts are made upon 
the bead of a family to permit bis character 
to grow crotchety or chronic. The bachelor, 
by always having his own way, soon forgets 
that there is any other stand-point than his 
own. His habits of thought and life insensi- 
bly enwrap him like a cocoon, and in time 
they become so essentially himself as to be the 
abode of his brain and sensibility. They fit 
so snugly and adhere so pertinaciously as to 
give a general expression of tightness to his 
character. There is nothing to man more 
natural than selfishness. It is inevitable if 
possible. If .you, Jack, had not married at 
twenty, and become a grandfather at forty, 
you could never have become the man you 
are ; especially if a combination of happy or 
accidental circumstances had made you rich. 
Instead of looking on as you now do with 
strange interest at these gentlemen, you would 
at this moment be in the same placid and 



gentlemen's parlor. 95 

solitary possession of a little universe of your 
own, with all your faculties and feelings so 
completely tethered by your little interests 
and comforts, as to make you also think your- 
self indispensable to the world. My acquaint- 
ance with Job has enabled me to observe the 
gradual growth of so peculiar a character. 
My wife likes him, notwithstanding his ways, 
and he likes her (not unwisely nor too well), 
which may partly explain her attachment. 
With all his crotchets, he has a certain 
thoughtful consideration for others, which I 
have observed is a distinguishing trait of per- 
sons of his class, till they grow old. Until 
they are so old as to be rigid, they seem to 
be conscious that, to have their own exactions 
respected, they must yield correspondingly to 
the demands of others. This may be only the 
shrewdness of selfishness, but to women espe- 
cially it is agreeable. I observe that exactly 
in proportion as Job insists upon the acknowl- 
edgment of his own peculiar notions, he yields 
a respectful assent to those he is indifferent 



96 HALF TINTS. 

about. He lias not yet attained that sover- 
eignty of self-sufficiency which, requires un- 
qualified obeisance. "When that is achieved 
he will have advanced beyond the understand- 
ing and indulgence of any but his own class, 
and will naturally surrender himself to it. 
That extremity you see illustrated now. It 
shows itself in a spirit of accommodation and 
tolerance which only themselves could acquire 
or practise. Observing their forbearance and 
politeness and kindness to each other, you 
would hardly suspect they could take each 
other in pieces, whim after whim, vanity after 
vanity, as a mechanician would his machine. 
But they know that the houses they live in 
are so vitreous that the bare thought of a stone 
terrifies them. Each poor conscious quivering 
bundle is so sensitive to exposure or hand- 
ling as to trust itself only to assortment for 
security. 

Rich and prosperous, and by virtue of cir- 
cumstances controlling those about them, they 
very naturally feel uneasy that they are not 



gentlemen's paklor. 97 

acknowledged omnipotent. That feeling as 
naturally leads them to disparage what they 
cannot control. They are annoyed to find 
that, much as wealth and prosperity have 
brought them, there is yet much more which 
is not purchasable. Nothing, for instance, sur- 
prises or plagues them more than a manly 
utterance, which goes crashing its way through 
their weak cobwebs of fears and conceits, by a 
man they never heard of as successful. 

Their themes of conversation are suggested 
mainly by their prosperity and fears. Their 
oracular manner of disposing of all vexed ques- 
tions would amuse you. Infatuated with their 
gains and successes, they are unfitted to judge 
for the millions who are struggling for per- 
sonal liberty and independence. It would be 
extraordinary, situated as they are, if any 
one of them should entertain sentiments of 
generous breadth and humanity. The people 
they speak of as an unthinking mob, and are 
always ready with an argument in favor of 
limited suffrage. They think of the poor man 



98 HALF TINTS. 

as a drudge or a ruffian, fit only for menial 
service or revolution. Hugging so tightly 
their accumulations, and so systematically 
hoarding to swell them, they naturally think 
their own attainment supremely the ambition 
of all, and morbidly reason themselves inse- 
cure in the possession of that which ninety- 
nine hundredths must desperately covet. Caste, 
therefore, in social and civil life, is associated 
with locks, in their shallow philosophy of pro- 
tection. The man whom Souvestre describes 
as having a taste for poverty, is as much be- 
yond their comprehension as an archangel. 
They think that tax-payers take care of most 
of those who are not. Of the infinite help 
the poor are to each other they never dream. 
They exaggerate the immunities of wealth, 
and grumble at the ballot because it will not 
vote them titles _ and arm them with special 
privileges. Every man in the public service, 
or who seeks to be, is characterized as a cor- 
rupt politician. Every one of them, they 
think, has his price, and the multitude will 



99 

not favor such as are not to be bought. The 
always hopeful and anxiously struggling masses 
they speak of as ' these people. 5 One of these 
very comfortable half-dozen, made wealthy by 
the growth of a thrifty and industrious popula- 
tion about him, putting fabulous prices upon 
the vacant land left him by his grandfather, 
riding one bright afternoon in the public park 
behind his splendid bays and servant in livery, 
was heard to say felicitously, with a grand 
wave of his gloved hand, as he passed the 
happy crowd on foot, gathered on the green 
listening to the music : c How commendable, 
that the generous wealth of this opulent city 
has provided so delightful a place for all these 
people.' ' Such people,' he is nearly of be- 
lief, are of another genus than himself, which 
the excuse of a shadow or two in complexion 
would establish. That such people are per- 
mitted to vote, is a sufficient reason why 
persons of his class should not attend the 
polls. Not voting relieves them of all respon- 
sibility for bad government, and gives them a 



100 HALF TINTS. 

sweeping license to complain. In their opin- 
ion, it is rather vulgar to vote, as those who 
do the voting are mainly vulgar. They prefer 
to keep themselves clean by avoiding such 
associations. If they do not exert themselves 
to elevate the people, they hold themselves 
not accountable for their degradation. The 
reply of the idle philosopher, that every one 
ought to give account of his actions, but not 
of his leisure, is their theory of responsibility. 
To hear them talk, you would discover that 
their idea of the best civilization is a perfect 
and unchangeable classification of society. 
They have all of them been ' abroad, 5 and 
express themselves delighted with the settled 
condition of every thing. They have con- 
cluded that society is happier if in every way 
limits are defined for it. Opening the future 
to every man, and giving him a fair chance, 
is, in their opinion, the cause of all the disorder 
and discontent in free America. The fact 
that every man is a possible law-maker and 
executive, is in their apprehension only a 



gentlemen's parlor. 101 

premium upon tumult and anarchy. In the 
same sense they regard universal education as 
a disturbing influence, and find many reasons 
for believing the system of public schools per- 
ilous to the peace and safety of the State. 

Their mode of making each other happy is 
not novel, but systematic. They are so kindly 
and graceful about it that the manner is almost 
as pleasing as the effect. Softly wrapped and 
calmly composed as they seem, they yet need 
to have their complacency occasionally reen- 
forced. It has been my pleasure to be present 
frequently, and witness the delightful process. 
And you must know the charming result is 
additionally sweetened by the presence of a 
few who are not of the select number, as a 
dignified assemblage of any sort is put upon 
its good behavior and made to do its' best by 
an audience. The admiration and envy which 
are understood to be excited in those who listen, 
reflect the chosen in grander proportions than 
their own estimate of themselves had approxi- 
mated. These meetings for admiration, exalta- 



102 HALF TESTTS. 

tion, and manipulation, are so irregular as to 
appear accidental, and each is so natural, and 
easy, and self-adjusting, as to appear the first 
and only. The least show of art in their con- 
duct would make them a caricature even to 
themselves, as an exhibition of magic to ma- 
gicians would be ridiculous. The man under 
the table must be concealed if credulity and 
wonder are to be kept in countenance. You 
remember, long ago, in the old school-house, 
the explosive effect of the travelling astronom- 
ical lecturer attempting to illustrate the solar 
system by a squeaking planetarium. 

It is only in times of agitation that the 
soothing oil is requisite. The first muttering 
of a tempest suggests the remedy. The appli- 
ances to tranquillize and felicitate are set in 
motion by a single shadow of trouble in one 
placid face. Doubloon, one of the six, has 
been unduly alarmed for the safety of an in- 
vestment. An insurance company in which 
he has some shares has suffered by a sweeping 
fire. An occasion when all are together is 



gentlemen's paeloe. 103 

seized upon to put him back upon his plane 
of complacency. One by one bis other invest- 
ments are referred to, and presented in the 
most profitable light. His sagacity in possess- 
ing certain vacant lots is commended as re- 
markable, and he quite forgets his losses in 
his inestimable prospective gains. Meanwhile 
silent, he pulls his jacket over his round belly, 
and is contented. The machine is fairly started. 
Eagle, the glittering holder of bank stock, comes 
in next for a flood of admiration. JSfo common 
man, it is agreed, Doubloon included, could 
have foreseen the happy accidents to finances 
which sent his shares to the highest figure on 
the list. Exalted and made easy, he is ready 
to join with the rest in complimenting Sov- 
ereign upon his wisdom in selecting such agen- 
cies as have converted his mines of anthracite 
into silver. ]STo other man in the Republic 
could have selected so many men to represent 
him without being deceived in some of them. 
So exhibited, Sovereign sees himself in greater 
proportions than his ambition had ever endowed 



104 HALF TINTS. 

him with. Adjusting his wig, he is all at 
once impressed with the aptitude of Slug for 
comprehensive commercial enterprises. The 
rest promptly agree with him in asserting that 
another man could not be found in the wide 
world who could so have anticipated the growth 
of cities on remote uninhabited shores. And 
Slug's imagination floats in succession the rich 
argosies which brought him his splendid opu- 
lence. Thaler, till now busy with sage com- 
mendations of the rest, has settled himself to 
receive his own share of encomium. Which 
seeing, Slug lifts himself, delighted, to the ex- 
pected service. In Slug's opinion Thaler would 
have done as well or better with the same 
opportunities which he himself had seized with 
only qualified success. Thaler's stock opera- 
tions proved, in the judgment of all, a breadth 
of wisdom and forecast, which, carried into 
grander schemes, would have brought him mil- 
lions where he only realized thousands. His 
modesty in being contented with such small 
returns, when as well they might have been 



gentlemen's parlor. 105 

prodigious, is rather berated than commended. 
Which general impression of boundless untried 
resources puts Thaler in such delightful exalta- 
tion, as to make him unconsciously push back 
the stiff linen about his neck to make room 
for his swelling person, till now a still absorb- 
ent of great opinions. And now only Napo- 
leon, the imperial coin of the realm, remains 
to be lifted by generous loosened tongues to 
the top of possible human attainment. His 
phrases of praise have been the weightiest and 
most graceful, and deserve a return in kind, 
compounded. Serenely he listens to the sweet 
strains of Doubloon, Eagle, Sovereign, Slug, 
and Thaler, swelling together in liquid sym- 
phony. His successes, in the estimation of 
all, indicate not only wisdom, but prophecy. 
ISTo man, a mere man, could have accomplished 
so much, and so easily. Events had always 
occurred as he predicted, and they all now see 
plainly their shortsightedness in not accepting 
him a seer. If his sagacity and wisdom had 
been occupied with public affairs, it is easy to 

5* 



106 HALF TINTS. 

see how disastrous collisions between nations 
would have been avoided, and the highest civ- 
ilization secured to peoples who seem going 
downward in darkness. And, all glowing, the 
six simultaneously rise, in unctuous plenitude 
of sweet praises. What wonder if for a week 
after they look out upon the fair world and 
wonder it is not fairer, and that better beings 
than ' these people ' are not vouchsafed to min- 
ister to them. 



VIII. 



THE EXCHANGE. 



VIII. 

THE EXCHANGE. 

The common room, in which the multitude 
devour newspapers and tobacco, and talk and 
write furiously, is too remindful of sober events 
to linger in. All the great and little bubbles 
have representatives in it. The intelligent eye 
will readily classify them. The more desper- 
ate schemes are represented by men who else- 
where would pass for clergymen. They are 
not noisy, nor impatient, but can wait. They 
prefer to exhibit their maps or specimens or 
models in sumptuous private parlors, and only 
to those whose ears are nearest their pockets. 
Their schemes and services would be cheap- 
ened by a public display of them ; besides, 



110 HALF TINTS. 

they know that birds are not caught by shak- 
ing the net. These respectable-looking gentle- 
men have histories and habitations, which 
have no connection with present purposes, and 
are not referred to. Nothing, indeed, could 
so much disturb their equanimity as to meet 
unexpectedly those who have known them inti- 
mately. Old matters are so foreign from the 
new that they are loath to have them compli- 
cated. Their grand theories and projects of 
development, seeking great capital to try them, 
would be embarrassed by the exposure of only 
failure and fraud in other enterprises of theirs, 
quite as promising. They prefer to have their 
arguments of to-day stand for themselves, un- 
shaken by illustrations from records of decep- 
tion and ruin. 

Dryden*says, that when the nation boils 
the scum rises, the truth of which, it would 
seem, has been proven in the course of our war. 
In the general upheaval and trial of all the 
elements of society, the alert adventurers have 
reaped the advantages. Fixed interests might 



THE EXCHANGE. Ill 

be advanced, bnt the danger of their destruc- 
tion was imminent. Even these were accom- 
modated as far as possible to the prevailing 
spirit of speculation. Uncertainty fast be- 
came the rule, which every new issue of prom- 
ises, every call for troops, every disaster 
in the field, helped to establish. Men most 
faithless in the future of the Republic seemed 
to thrive best in her darkest hours. After a 
bad defeat, the faithful citizen, sorrowing and 
silent, passing through assemblages of desper- 
ate speculators, such as at night crowded the 
more public rooms of the great hotels, and 
observing the crowd jubilant over calamity, 
suffered an insult to his patriotism which he 
must ever wonder he could endure. 

That meek-looking man we met as we 
came in ; did you notice him ? He is a char- 
acter I have observed with curious interest. 
He slid by as noiselessly as an apparition. 
His cat-footed tread, to those who hear it, tells 
his history. The only man who seems to know 
him has told me he is rich. Tou would not 



112 HALF TINTS. 

suspect it to look at him. - So much modesty 
and retirement of manner you never saw in a 
slave. His dress and accessaries betoken any 
thing but wealth. He is intelligent, but his 
thoughts have the shakiness of terror. Much 
as he knows, his life is a lie, and his knowledge 
is of little worth. He has sailed the Nile, 
crossed the Great Desert, inspected Pompeii, 
roamed over the Holy Land, explored the Cat- 
acombs, climbed Mont Blanc, domesticated in 
all the great cities, gone down under the ocean 
into the mines of Cornwall, been shipwrecked, 
escaped icebergs, more than all, travelled his 
own country, seeing its mountains, and caves, 
and rivers, and great personages, yet he steals 
about as if crime had been his occupation, 
and every victim was pursuing him. Alas, his 
only real enemies are the tax-gatherer and 
himself. His wealth is in securities, and the 
concealment of it is the mystery and burden 
of his life. He flits from country to country, 
from city to city, and is only long enough 
necessarily anywhere to gather his dividends. 



THE EXCHANGE. 113 

His avarice and cowardice have made him 
shrink and cower till wretchedness and terror 
express themselves in every lineament and 
movement. The wreck of an intellect never 
looked out of a wasted body and empty 
brain more pitifully than this wretched crea- 
ture begs concealment and obscurity from 
every shadow and every man the world over. 

You are reminded of the trader's device, 
before the steamboat was invented, when the 
Southwest was infested with red men and rob- 
bers. Receiving specie at K~ew Orleans for 
his produce, he put it in a wet buckskin belt 
of sufficient length to surround the body, 
which, as it dried, shrunk round the coin, till 
no amount of shaking would cause it to jingle. 
Just so is the humanity of this man shrunk 
round his possessions, till his heart never jin- 
gles with a manly impulse. 

The middle man of the group before you, 
with the polished forehead, pulling his beard ; 
observe him. He is a genius in speculation. 
So securely poised, his figure would suggest to 



114 HALF TINTS. 

sculpture a statue of destiny. His spinal col- 
umn must be in a direct line to the centre of 
the earth, so upright he appears. His leisurely 
generalizations have the freshness of original 
wisdom, and are compact enough for proverbs. 
So far above the ordinary plane, his easy 
guesses give an impression of prescience. All 
things in all lights, and his words the essence 
of all. The clatter of the squad in the corner 
over the decline in Erie, he hears as he does 
the oaths and glasses in the room adjoining. 
The mystery or peril, to the thoughtless talk- 
ers and drinkers invisible, is patent enough to 
him ; he seems to know the motives of the manip- 
ulators, and to divine results. His presump- 
tion is so supreme that it confuses and blinds. 
So much composure must be the token of ex- 
traordinary wisdom. Ephemera, distinguish- 
able from motes, accept him a sun, and flour- 
ish in his light, till the market turns. His 
own means are locked up, or he would risk 
them all in the scheme his judgment approves. 
If his friend, who approves also, and who is 



THE EXCHANGE. 115 

so fortunate as to have some thousands loose, 
will let him take it and use it as he would his 
own, he shall share with him the profits. Of 
losses, nothing is said. If they occur, his 
friend will enjoy a monopoly, the philosopher 
perhaps losing a little in confidence. So he 
deceives, and betrays, and flourishes. In a 
clean skin, in fresh raiment, immaculate man- 
ners, and the repose of virtue, he is the incar- 
nation of fraud, and he commands the admi- 
ration, if not the respect, of those he has de- 
frauded. The man who just now touched his 
hat to him was nearly ruined by him, I know. 
The scene revives events of the life and 
times of John Law. Anecdotes related by 
Thiers in his memoir of that incomparable 
schemer, are worth iterating, to illustrate the 
present, and show how history is repeated, 
after one hundred and fifty years. All classes 
of society, says the historian, mingled in the 
Rue Quincampoix, cherishing the same illu- 
sions, noblemen, churchmen, traders, quiet 
citizens, and servants, whom their suddenly 



116 HALF TINTS. 

acquired fortune had filled with the hope 
of rivalling their masters. All the houses 
in the street had been converted into offices 
by the stock-jobbers ; the occupants gave up 
their apartments, the merchants their shops ; 
houses which had brought a rent of seven 
or eight hundred francs, were cut up into 
some thirty offices, and brought fifty or sixty 
thousand francs ; stock-jobbing made itself 
felt in rents as in securities. A cobbler, 
who had converted his stall into an office 
by placing in it some stools, a table, and 
a writing-desk, rented it for two thousand 
francs a day. A humpbacked man, in the 
course of a few days, acquired one hundred 
and fifty thousand livres by letting out his 
hump as a writing-desk. The brokers organ- 
ized themselves into regular swindling com- 
panies. They speculated upon the constant 
rise, but more often still upon the fluctuations 
which they had the skill to produce. They 
ranged themselves in a line in the Rue Quin- 
campoix, ready to act at the first signal. At 



THE EXCHANGE. 



117 



the sound of a bell in the office of a man 
named Papillon, they offered, all at once, the 
shares, sold them, and effected a decline. At 
a different signal, they bought at the lowest 
price that which they had sold at the highest, 
and in this way brought about a reaction; 
thus they always ' sold dear and bought cheap.' 
The fluctuations were so rapid and so consid- 
erable, that brokers receiving shares to sell 
had time to make large profits by retaining 
them only one day. One is mentioned, who, 
commissioned to sell some shares, was absent 
two days. It was thought that he had stolen 
them. Not at all ; he repaid the price faith- 
fully, but meantime had made a million for 
himself. Servants became suddenly as rich as 
their masters. One of them, meeting his mas- 
ter walking in the rain, stopped his carriage 
to offer him a seat. A footman had gained so 
much that he provided himself with a fine 
carriage; but the first day it came to the 
door, he, instead of stepping into the vehicle, 
mounted up to his old station behind. Another, 



118 HALF TINTS. 

in a similar predicament, brought himself well 
off by pretending lie got np only to see if there 
was room on the back for two or three more 
lackeys, whom he was resolved to hire instantly. 
Law's coachman had made so great a fortune 
that he asked a dismission from his service, 
which was readily granted, on condition of pro- 
curing another as good as himself. The man 
therefore brought two coachmen to his master, 
both of them excellent drivers, and desired 
him to make choice of one, at the same time 
saying that he would take the other for his 
own carriage. One night at the opera, a Made- 
moiselle de Begond, observing a lady enter mag- 
nificently dressed, and covered with diamonds, 
jogged her mother, and said, ' I am much mis- 
taken if this fine lady is not Mary, our cook. 5 
The report spread through the theatre, till it 
came to the ears of the lady, who, coming up 
to Madame de Begond, said, ' I am indeed 
Mary, your cook. I have gained large sums 
in the Hue Quincampoix. I love fine clothes 
and fine jewels, and am accordingly dressed in 



THE EXCHANGE. 119 

them. I have paid for every thing, am in 
debt to nobody, and pray what has any per- 
son to say to this ? ' At another time, some 
persons of quality beholding a gorgeous figure 
alight from a most splendid equipage, and 
inquiring what great lady that was, one of 
her lackeys answered, 'A woman who has 
tumbled from a garret into a carriage.' One 
Brignaud, son of a baker, one of the suddenly 
rich, being desirous of having a superb service 
of plate, purchased all the articles exposed 
for sale in the shop of a goldsmith for forty 
thousand livres, and sent them home to his 
wife, with orders to set them out properly for 
supper, to which he had invited many persons 
of distinction. The lady, not understanding 
the business, arranged the plate according to 
her fancy, and without regard to their real 
use ; so that when supper was announced, the 
guests could not forbear from indulging in 
peals of laughter to see the soup served up 
in a basin for receiving the offerings at 
church, the sugar in a censer, and chalices 



120 HALF TINTS. 

holding the place of salt-cellars, while most 
of the other articles were more suited to a 
toilet than a sideboard. Those who had be- 
come rich, rushed into those violent pleasures 
and excesses which the soul of a gambler 
craves ; they displayed in their newly-acquired 
mansions that barbarous, monstrous luxury 
which signalized the age of Roman corrup- 
tion. 

These incidents, remember, word for word, 
are gathered, here and there, from the history 
of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble, Paris, 
Anno Domini, 1719. Yet the infatuated exalt 
the arts and conspiracies of the exchange as 
fresh inventions of genius, and the thoughtless 
pronounce their results unparalleled. 



IX. 



AN INMATE. 



IX. 

AN INMATE. 

I know of nothing, my friend, which, causes 
so much suffering as diseased sensibility. Per- 
sons of poetic nature, leading an insulated life, 
are sure to be more or less its victims. A 
remarkable instance came to my notice during 
the summer. Whence the solitary man came, 
who he was, no one knew, and no one had 
cared to know. ' He paid his bills, and ap- 
peared a gentleman,' was all they could say 
of him at the office. How my accidental 
acquaintance with him commenced, I cannot 
recall ; but once begun, his siren sympathy 
and strange wisdom enthralled me. I saw him 
occasionally, perhaps too often, in his solitary 



124 HALF TINTS. 

chamber, in his worst and sweetest moods. 
At times he kept me so vividly reminded of 
the Opium-Eater's awful Ladies of Sorrow — 
those impersonations of 'the mighty abstrac- 
tions that incarnate themselves in all indi- 
vidual sufferings of man's heart ' — as to make 
his presence as terrible as at other times it was 
charming. Now his eyes were ' sweet and 
subtle ; ' now they were ' filled with perishing 
dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten de- 
lirium ;' now they had 'the fierce light of a 
blazing misery.' At such times he was dumb 
to conscious utterance, and solemnly and pro- 
foundly abstracted. He paced his room or 
agonized in bed till the fearful fever or tem- 
pest was ended, and the cause of it all remained 
as dark as the hidden forces of nature we con- 
jecture only from their effects. 

I could see that he regarded the comfort- 
able hotel as a sort of hospital for his malady. 
Nobody troubled him with questions. I once 
heard him say, sadly (he never was . harsh)', 
' The last thing even the most sensible man 



AN INMATE. 125 

learns is not to ask questions.' The chamber- 
girl only, besides myself, seemed to know just 
when those attacks of himself, so to speak, 
began and ended. She stepped lightly by his 
door, and put a finger across her lips to repress 
any needless noise. Sometimes, during those 
tedious paroxysms, when his profound nature 
seemed ' upheaved by central convulsions' — 
when his heart trembled and brain rocked 
' under conspiracies of tempest from without 
and tempest from within ' — he sent for me ; 
but when they had passed, I went to him, 
unbidden. Going too suddenly in upon him 
one day, I found him sitting at the table, with 
a closed Bible in his hand. Pointing me to a 
seat, he said thoughtfully (I shall never forget 
his varying emphasis), with his eyes tenderly 
fixed upon the sacred volume : ' The way to 
Heaven in a book. Yes, the way to Heaven 
in a book. Yes, the way to Heaven in a 
Book. Yes, the Way to Heaven in a book. 
Yes ' (with an emotional emphasis melting 
away all creeds), 'The way to Heaven in a 



126 HALF TINTS. 

book.' What more could be said, I thought, 
and have often thought since. 

His talk upon the commonest topics, if he 
talked at all, was always refreshing and sug- 
gestive. He argued nothing; he seemed to 
have got beyond argument; seeing through 
all processes, and expressing only results. He 
was therefore never tedious, but always strik- 
ing. Assuming that you knew as much as him- 
self, and that therefore his conclusions must 
be yours, even the appearance of dogmatism 
he avoided. Talking with him, you would at 
times be even more surprised at yourself than 
at him; for his manner was so encouraging 
and inspiring as to give to your faculties a 
startling vigor, emancipating and translating 
you, mind and soul. When freest he seemed 
so free of the ordinary auxiliaries to thought, 
as to make you ashamed too much to rely 
upon them yourself. Unwittingly, too, you 
would tell your history, in your free utter- 
ances, as he told his own in his, if you but 
understood them. (' For history,' he once said, 



AN" INMATE. 127 

' is not the story of the man's daily walk and 
tailor's bills, but of that real life, which we 
dare not with our lips tell any one. But, in 
little bits, it tells itself, in part; and so our 
friends love us. If it could utter itself wholly, 
would they, perhaps, hate us, or look at us 
with awe, as strange genii, issuing in fearful 
mist from the strong box of their friendship, 
into which they had locked us as common 
mortals.') 

His faculties, in his best moods, had a deli- 
cacy and fineness, so to speak, only exceeded 
in his acute and trembling sensibility. Where 
his intellect could not penetrate, his universal 
sympathy seemed to admit him unquestioned. 
In life, his heart was with the weak and the 
struggling. In literature, his taste was most 
at home in the elevating and emotional. Once 
I heard him recite Coleridge's sublime Hymn 
to Sunrise in the Yale of Chamouni, and all 
I loved and hoped seemed gathered about the 
summit of Mont Blanc. He seemed trans- 
ported. When he repeated, with • solemn air,' 



128 HALF TINTS, 

the scene of family worship in the Cotter's Sat- 
urday Night, I found myself on my knees, by 
the little old chair, at the ' ingle side,' with 
mother, sisters, and brothers, forming c a circle 
wide,' intent while 'the saint, the father, and 
the husband' prayed; and when he dwelt 
upon the passage where 

The parent pair their secret homage pay, 
And proffer up to Heaven the warm request 
That He who stills the raven's clamorous nest, 

And decks the lily fair in flowery pride, 

Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, 

For them and for their little ones provide ; 

But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside ; 

I felt the tears of penitence and gratitude 
overflowing my eyes. In A' the airts the 
wind can blaw, I dearly like the West, he 
brought me my darling Mary of childhood. 
When he recited To Mary in Heaven, I 
heard the ' groans that rend the breast' of 
every distressed lover. In his repetition of the 
sweet poem, To the Mountain Daisy, I heard 
the inspiring song of the ' bonnie lark, wi' 



AN INMATE. 129 

speckled breast/ bending the ' crimson-tipped 
flower 'mang tlie dewy weet,' and ' upward- 
springing, blithe, to greet the purpling east. 5 
But to hear him murmur, Come into the Gar- 
den, Maud, was a pleasure above description. 
The ' soul of the rose ' went into his blood, and 
the ' breeze of the morning' moved in his 
voice. Led by the sentiment of the poet, he 
walked the garden, and the flowers greeted 
him. You heard the red rose cry, and the 
white rose weep, and the larkspur listen, and 
the lily whisper ; and when there fell ' a 
splendid tear from the passion-flower,' one 
not less splendid broke over his illuminated 
fa<3e. 

Sometimes he made verses — just to amuse 
himself, he said, as he would play a game of 
solitaire. If these I quote show the elevation 
and tone of his feelings when most elastic and 
expressible, you may guess their depth and 
darkness when unutterable : 



6* 



130 HALF TINTS. 

****** 

Seem'st thou never worn nor weary, 
Never sad or never dreary ; 
Weights of others always bearing, 
Griefs of others always sharing. 
Heart so tender, timid never, 
Hands so gentle, willing ever ; 
Wounds of thine in strength concealing, 
Wounds of others always healing. 

The stricken heart could not endure, 
Thy love withheld, its balm and cure ; 
Despairing want could hope no more, 
Thy kindness lost, its trusted store. 
The sun obscured, the sickly plant 
But feels the more its every want ; 
An hour of cloud, it yields to blight, 
Despairing ever of the light. 

Tongue of distress, never so dumb, 
Utters its plaint when thou dost come ; 
Assured at least a kindly ear, 
A tender blessing and soothing tear. 
The burden off, the eyes of care 
Brighten and beam as heaven were there ; 
Smoothed the pillow, the throbbing brain 
Survives the pang and sleeps again. 



AN INMATE. 131 

One morning I missed him. Inquiring at 
the office, they said he had departed. In- 
quiring further, sometime after, I learned, 
alas, that he had departed — this life — by his 
own hand. 



X. 



NOT A SERMON. 



NOT A SERMON. 

'Sir,' said he, the strange man, at the end 
of our last long interview, ' my words are not 
to teach you, but to refer you to what you 
know. If you can be taught by preaching, 
they are not for you. Results, not processes, 
teach. If they do not show their own growth, 
narrate their own histories, they are not such, 
or you do not apprehend them. You are 
understood to see in a gray hair the vicissi- 
tudes of a life. You are presumed to know 
goodness by its fruits, and how utter is sorrow 
which is unutterable. 

' The mother may make the boy, but the 
man must make himself, and the man will be 



136 HALF TINTS. 

as incomprehensible to his mother as to his 
friend. Precepts are so often written in water, 
while experiences infix themselves as by the 
point of a diamond. The scar from a wound 
got in a failing effort, or the great throb felt 
upon possession of a soul-sought object, will 
make us shun or pursue as no words could, 
however wise or sagacious. We bow to the 
wisdom of King Solomon's preaching, but do 
not account for the apostasy of his son Ee- 
hoboam. . 

' The father would have his daughter always 
immaculate. Her companions he sees as she 
cannot see them. She does not see them at 
all. Her eyes are not opened upon them with 
that view. He knows if they are meet before 
she has begun to ask herself. The false or 
corrupt book he has stolen an enjoying glance 
at himself, he would put from her as certain 
death. He sees in her the wife, and mother, 
and guardian of a home. He knows that the 
truth, and fidelity, and virtue, are not only 
good in themselves, but that they are neees- 



NOT A SERMON. 137 

sary to save society from wreck. His anxieties 
do not so much, result from a love of the good 
and the right, as from a consciousness of evils 
and perils to be avoided and escaped. 

' The fixed expression and filling eye of the 
parent when the lover of his daughter asks 
her in marriage, are profoundest mysteries to 
the youthful petitioner. He cannot conceive 
the mirage of twenty years of peaceful and 
tragic life which that moment looms in the 
vision of the parent, and strains to painful ten- 
sion his faculties of memory and reflection. 
The child is seen at every stage of growth and 
development, from babyhood to maturity, with 
every obstacle and temptation which beset her 
path, and every hope and triumph and rapture 
which inspired it. He has just learned how 
entirely she is made up of himself, and him- 
self of her, and how completely her marriage 
will change their relations with each other 
and all the world. Her happiness and prog- 
ress and purity have enlisted his life, and no 
part of his life worth any thing is separable 



138 HALF TENTS. 

from hers. He is asked to surrender the 
object of every hope, anxiety, and emotion, 
and trust her to the guidance of blindness and 
chance. His dumb face and the falling tear 
are emblems of his life as at that moment he 
feels it must be when she is gone. 

' Death is as great a wonder to Youth as 
life is to Age. Youth is ever growing and 
realizing. His look into the sunless grave is 
blank and bewildered. His round eyes and 
radiant face are set upon an upward, sunny 
path. No blow of disappointment has stag- 
gered his expectation, and left an eternal mark 
upon him. He employs no spies, and advances 
without scouts. He has not learned the uses 
of treachery and caution. Easy advancement 
has made him bold and confident. He believes 
the future is in his fist. He does not know 
that so far all helps have been supplied him, 
and will continue to be supplied, till he fails. 
The fledgling, left to flutter alone, is hopefully 
and trustingly observed by those who know 
forces and currents. Humanity has generously 



NOT A SERMON. 139 

opened a way and given him a start. His 
sails belly with all good wishes. The world 
would not have him fail. It will not give up 
its faith in its best ideal. Individuals acknowl- 
edge they have failed, but they do not quite 
get their consent to believe that an individ- 
ual may not exist who cannot fail. If the one 
well-remembered fatal thing done or omitted 
had been omitted or done, they might have 
been such themselves. The possible man who 
cannot err nor blunder, and who cannot be 
betrayed nor baffled, is the universal Messiah. 
Wisdom, dumb and grave, and Experience, 
with doubt and discouragement in every 
wrinkle, forget truth and life, lose themselves 
in the contemplation of his beautiful vigor 
and fleetness, and believe him invincible. 
They look through the long past, and see 
themselves in the fascinating being. Prodigy 
and miracle. Figure erect — limbs round — 
veins full and hot— skin glistening — hair shak- 
ing out the sunshine. So full of bounding 
life that his sleep must be disturbed by ravish- 



140 



HALF TINTS. 



ing dreams of to-morrow. Suggestion of dan- 
gers in his way would be insufficient to put 
him on Ms guard, if time were allowed to hear 
it. He must learn obstacles by confronting 
them, and encountering them one at a time, 
his strong right arm is strengthened by strik- 
ing them down. He makes a joke of armor 
and defences, and calls deliberation or hesita- 
tion weakness. But one day Fraud or Paral- 
ysis strikes, and new eyes are suddenly given 
him. He sees so many doubts and difficulties 
in his way, that he can hardly determine to 
move at all. He learns a new language, and 
applies new names. He discovers motives, 
and dizzies trying to sound them. His anx- 
ieties and disappointments are hooks in his 
side which turn him over and over in his bed. 
Abstraction puzzles him. He will be seeing 
things without their disguises, and the habit 
soon becomes his character. Dealing so much 
with shams and devices, he comes to suspect 
even the genuine and real, and feels daily the 
gradual decay and death of the ardor, ingen- 



NOT A SERMON. 141 

uousness and confidence which ennobled and 
inspired the best part of his life. His pene- 
tration and suspicions second-sight make him 
acquainted with the little arts and artifices of 
his fellows, and he acquires a certain strength 
and mastery by appropriating them. But such 
a bundle of weaknesses he feels must fall apart. 
Such an embodiment of frailties, instincts, little 
qualities, little faculties, and distrust, cannot 
last. Made up in great part of what is worn 
out, debauched, wasted, and worthless, the most 
natural thing, he thinks, is that it should die. 
' An attempt by law-makers to define mo- 
tives, and by judges to punish them, would be 
puzzling occupation. Penances and penalties 
can only be affixed to them by ourselves and 
Omniscience. To a self-observant man nothing 
can be more interesting and surprising than 
his own, as they appear to himself, ^and as 
they are interpreted by others. Often they 
seem wholly beyond his comprehension or con- 
trol. They are prompted he does not always 
know how nor why, and will lead him he 



142 HALF TINTS. 

cannot tell where. Their meanness often hu- 
miliates him, and he uses the utmost caution 
and carefulness to conceal them. His com- 
placency is only preserved by a conscious- 
ness of the world's ignorance of them. Better 
motives than the real ones are often attributed 
to him, which both satirize and dignify his 
conduct. His greatest achievements often 
spring from motives so insignificant that he 
would be ashamed to acknowledge them. His 
apparent and exemplary virtues would lose 
much of their effect if the secret crimes which 
alarmed them into exercise were exposed. 
Worse motives are also found for his conduct 
than ever entered his heart, the possession of 
which would make him a different man. If 
conspicuous good to others result from an act 
meant primarily to benefit himself, his saga- 
cious benevolence is praised, and his char- 
acter accepted a model. If wrong be inci- 
dentally or intentionally done his neighbor 
through his neighbor's simplicity or ignorance, 
his conscience is soothed by the protecting 



NOT A SERMON. 143 

statute. He has been annoyed by an osten- 
tatious recognition and acknowledgment of 
acts, with a parade of assumed systematic 
intentions, when the real ones so spontane- 
ously sprung from his humanity that design 
or calculation was impossible. Their intrinsic 
goodness was so disparaged and obscured by 
misinterpretation and flaunting that their 
promising fruit was stinted in the growth. 
The sweeter virtues, crushed into life, are 
embarrassed by being displayed. The silent 
tear which attends their birth drops away in 
shame at being discovered. 

'Life, in the remote country, is simple, 
and does not stimulate exertion. Wants are 
few and inexpensive. Much money is not 
needed to get all we desire. It is only when 
civilization is seen at its centres, where skill 
and taste and treasure have accumulated incal- 
culable objects of beauty and comfort, that we 
apprehend how much there is to enjoy, and 
how much is required to purchase it all. New 
and extraordinary incentives to wealth are 



144 HALF TIKTS. 

awakened by the exhibition of its uses. The 
wants created by the education and stimula- 
tion of our senses and sensations soon become 
exacting and insatiable, and our efforts to 
satisfy them astonish us by their continuity 
and desperation. 

'If an apprehension of the many objects 
of sensuous and esthetic enjoyment in this life 
makes us so prodigiously diligent in the accu- 
mulation of the means to enjoy them, how 
much the more would an unwavering belief 
in an immortal life of delight and progression 
make us diligent in the acquisition of the loves 
and virtues, without which we must lack the 
resources and capacities to enjoy its beatitudes. 
As cities awaken and quicken a desire for 
wealth by exhibiting so many desirable objects 
which only money can buy, so an abiding 
belief that in the immeasurable future our 
enjoyment of its prerogatives and felicities 
will depend upon our fitness and preparation 
for them, would inspire the utmost diligence 
in laying up treasures for Heaven. With the 



NOT A SEBMON. 145 

thought of a future existence perpetually pres- 
ent, and the belief that this fleeting life is 
only for purposes of discipline and culture, 
all love of ostentation and applause would 
be precluded. By those whose lives and aims 
are fitted for this world and limited to it, are 
its rewards and honors most sought and es- 
teemed. The simple offices and acquisitions 
of virtue and goodness, which make little sign 
and are ill-recognized by men, win the smile 
which beams immortally. 

'As we live, and enjoy, and grow, how 
content we should be to give up what we have, 
with a certainty that hence our joys and capa- 
cities will be increased and perpetuated. The 
primer must be laid aside for the next book in 
the course, which will include it. The forms 
fall away, but the spirit passes. The chaff, 
which protected and rounded the wheat, is 
left to perish after the winnowing. Dis- 
cipline and processes, desiderata now, if we 
grow at all, must become gyves. We must 
put off and put on, until all auxiliaries be- 



146 HALF TINTS. 

come unnecessary under the guardianship of 
the Infallible. 

'If we truly believed and realized that 
here we begin to be what we are to be ever, 
how absorbing and resourceful life would be. 
How conscientiously and persistently we would 
seek the good and avoid the evil. How suspi- 
ciously and jealously we would guard our- 
selves against all which must perish with the 
body, and how anxiously cultivate all which 
must survive it. Happiness would not be 
sought in its transient forms. Life would be 
appreciated for its resultant uses. The duty 
of the hour would be the duty of eternity. 
The good would inhere. The present would 
be realized as the time to work in ; and having 
something to do worth doing, we should need 
all the time we have to do it well. The duties 
of to-day faithfully discharged, we would not 
concern ourselves about to-morrow. To-mor- 
row would be so far provided for that it would 
be anticipated and made easy, if it come. Re- 
finement and tenderness and excellence would 



NOT A SEEMON. 147 

result from fidelity to duty, and a happiness 
would be established as serene as it would be 
unconscious. Living and acting, and getting 
the pleasure and good of life in duty, we should 
enjoy a foretaste of fruition and perpetuity.' 



XL 



HAPPINESS. 



XI. 

HAPPINESS. 

About midnight. Mrs. Allgot lias just 
coine in, attended by her accredited escort, 
the accomplished Captain. They have been 
to the opera, and have stopped an hour at a 
French restaurant to refresh themselves. Ele- 
gantly attired and faithfully attended, she has 
been the admiration of all. Her diamonds 
sparkle, but do not outshine her brilliant black 
eyes, retouched with a dazzling lustre by the 
fat oysters and half-bottle of Gold Seal. The 
good-humor and fondness of both are over- 
flowing, but they repress themselves in good 
taste, and separate politely. Good old Mr. 
Allgot, the happy husband of so much ra- 



152 HALF TINTS. 

diancy, alone in his chamber and sweet bed, 
has bad three solid hours of dreamless slum- 
ber, and would be a churl to complain of a 
little disturbance by her who at the court of 
fashion has conferred upon him so much dis- 
tinction. Thoughtful and sympathizing, he 
cannot but participate the pleasure of unlacing 
and disrobing, after so many hours of tension 
and splendor. His dull ears, if they hear the 
rustling silks, only echo the admiration they 
have excited, and he is less disturbed than the 
many who envy her. Instead of the splash- 
ing water agitating his nerves, he feels them 
soothed in the balmy refreshment it gives to 
her throbbing temples. The powder out of 
her hair, and robed in her immaculate linen, 
she feels in every fibre of her youthful person 
the exquisite joy of a convalescent. Overcome 
and spent, what to her are the square limbs 
and knotted joints of the kind old man by her 
side ? In the needed sleep will come back to 
her the caressing kindness of the Captain; 
a thousand eyes will reflect her splendor ; and 



HAPPINESS. 153 

the generous wine, pervading her blood with 
a subtle warmth, will lift the curtain of her 
dreams upon more than earthly ravishment. 
A remembered swell of music will transport 
her to rapturous heights, and a white cloud 
float her to elysium. If her muttered words 
and agitated slumber keep the old man awake, 
he remembers that youth is dreamy, and he 
would not have his chamber dreamless. If 
he grow tired of the bed when his young 
darling is most enamoured of it, his accus- 
tomed early walk will relieve them both. If 
he move carelessly, in the dim light of the 
morning, amongst her splendid robes, his 
crushing them will stir her less than the 
slightest ordinary contact ; for his opulence 
bought them, and can buy a thousand, more 
splendid. The soft dawn upon her mellowing 
bosom reflects itself in the mirror as he dresses 
himself, and his pure taste discovers only 
beauty in the picture, which touching her 
never so gently would only disturb. The 
landscape on the wall beyond, he thinks, 

7* 



154 HALF TINTS. 

is not more irradiated by the morning flush 
than her sleeping beauty. 

Ah, sweet are the uses of civility, and a 
rough arrangement society would be without 
it. Feeble as we discover ourselves to be, and 
too short-lived, with the best faculties, to get 
much wisdom, we find in it our most conveni- 
ent solace at last. (It may sometimes be car- 
ried doubtfully far, as in the case of indulgent 
old Galba, ' who, having entertained Maecenas 
at supper, and seeing his young wife cast ten- 
der glances, and complot love by signs, let 
himself sink down upon his cushion, like one 
in a profound sleep, to give opportunity to 
their fondling ; which he himself handsomely 
confessed ; for at the same time a servant 
making bold to filch a vase that stood upon 
the table, he frankly cried : Hold, you rogue. 
Do you not see that I sleep only for Mae- 
cenas?') The apparently incongruous com- 
panionships we sometimes see must find their 
bond of union in a generous civility. Some 
cynic has said there could be no happy mar- 



HAPPINESS. 155 

riage but betwixt a blind wife and a deaf 
husband, which the bliss of this couple dis- 
proves. Their liberality forbids them seeing 
or hearing what might excite distrust or jeal- 
ousy. His experience and age have taught 
him the folly of monopoly. Her beauty and 
youth, so generally acknowledged, have taught 
her the meanness of selfishness. ' Small is the 
worth of beauty from the light retired. 5 She 
must 'suffer herself to be desired, and not 
blush so to be admired.' He rejoices in his 
ability to load her with laces and jewels, and 
she also. His frailty has taught him humility, 
and he is glad of his wealth as a resource for 
her affections. It was natural, in the fulness 
of his possessions, and her ardor to share them, 
for him to forget the trifle of manhood. Some- 
thing is sure to be forgotten, even by the 
wisest, in the tumult of the tender passion. 
Tithonus, you know, in love with Eor, asked 
to be made immortal, that he might love her 
forever, but forgot, in his ardor, to ask the 
little essential of perennial youth. Finding 



156 HALF TINTS. 

himself maimed, and left ' to dwell in presence 
of immortal youth, immortal age beside im- 
mortal youth, and all he was in ashes, 5 and 
deploring that the gods could not recall the 
terrible gift, asked to be changed, and in pity 
was, into a grasshopper. 

The worldly philosophy of Balzac, that 
there are few happy couples but couples of 
four, if ever true, would appear to be, in a 
certain sense, in this instance. The old gen- 
tleman has formed many attachments, begin- 
ning with his teens and increasing with his 
years, which are now so essentially a part of 
him that existence would be dreariness without 
them. The object of an early passion, living 
in the next street, for many years the wife 
of an India merchant, whom he every day 
visits, and whose society revives every pleasant 
memory, may be counted the first and ten- 
derest. With her, he is oblivious of the events 
of fifty years, and lives over again the halcyon 
period when the world was best and wisest. 
His young hopes blossom again in retrospec- 



HAPPINESS. 157 

tion. If his relations with, her be marked by 
a touch of tenderness, it is but the response of 
a thousand memories, and is too sacred ever to 
be impure. A jest upon it would give him a 
wound which nothing could heal. Its enjoy- 
ment is the compensation for unnumbered ills. 
Any thing may be referred to but that ; that 
never unkindly. Too hallowed the cherished 
intercourse for defence or discussion. Another 
of his attachments is an old friend, with whom, 
in early years, he was associated in prosperous 
business. "With him, the schemes and perils 
of trade are revived, and he is reminded of his 
energies and successes. Every crisis in their 
joint enterprises is again and again worked 
through, and every difficulty seems ever as 
hard as when their master minds and wills 
overcame it. Reviewing any one of their 
achievements the thousandth time, they forget 
their infirmities, and walk the room with the 
tread of conquest and defiance. The old fire 
and purpose flash out of their eyes, and all 
obstacles, so petty and contemptible, melt 



158 HALF TINTS. 

away. Rejuvenated by this heroic process, 
' Old Allgot 5 is not to be despised, nor bis 
fellow-champion either. If the latter be a 
little disagreeable on account of unfortunate 
habits, he is not to be disparaged nor offended. 
So great a resource as his society 'twould be 
perilous to obstruct. It must be permitted as 
often and as long as either elect, without ques- 
tioning or impatience. And his ailments, too, 
are attachments, which he cannot quit if he 
would. Formed late in life, long after the ten- 
derer ties, they are just as tenacious and exact- 
ing. A lumbago, which so long has affection- 
ately hugged his loins, claims much of his time 
and attention, and much gentle manipulation 
and consideration are required to soothe it. 
And an asthma has crept into his throat, mod- 
ulating his voice, and making his respiration 
too sensible to himself and to others. As a 
profligate son, they must be endured, and a 
civil and accommodating treatment is neces- 
sary to make them tolerable. These and other 
peculiar ties and affections, requiring so much 



HAPPINESS. 159 

civility and consideration, have in turn made 
him considerate and civil. Especially have 
they made him so to his blooming wife. And 
he has discovered with pleasure that about in 
proportion to his liberality and license are her 
patience and kindness. Her unembarrassed 
relations with the prudent Captain, instead of 
diminishing her love, have increased it. Be- 
fore the pleasant acquaintance was formed, 
she seemed at times a little indifferent to her 
husband; but now her fondness for him is 
always demonstrative. Under such circum- 
stances he would be ungrateful to deny her 
any thing. She is too brilliant to shine for 
him only. The splendor of her charms would 
pale if limited to the twilight of decline. Her 
volatility and vitality would be sure to weary 
under the continued weight of his heaviness. 
The Captain, for his fidelity and circumspec- 
tion, commands his admiration and gratitude. 
He is delighted that his lovely wife has found 
so suitable and trusty a friend. So nearly of 
an age, and so much alike in tastes and tern- 



160 



HALF TINTS. 



perament, they seem inevitably to have come 
together. Her better nature is cultivated by 
the Captain's many good offices, and her 
civility and tenderness to her hnsband are a 
thousand times increased by the repeated 
indulgence of her gushing humors. 

[You remember the lines of "Waller, On 
One Married to an Old Man, which we laughed 
over before we became philosophers : 

Since thou wouldst needs (bewitched, by some ill charms), 

Be buried in those monumental arms, 

All we can wish is — May that earth be light 

Upon thy tender limbs ; and so good-night.] 



XII 



POOR BODIES. 



XII. 

POOR BODIES. 

In these material times, when every de- 
mand is supplied, the fashionable doctor is an 
indispensable luxury. I encounter him often, 
in halls and drawing-rooms. He lives in a 
palace, and fares sumptuously. His carriage 
at any house goes far to fix the rank of the 
occupant. He is not to perform miracles, as 
the world is now too wise to expect the mirac- 
ulous. The human machine is admitted to be 
frail, and destined to go to pieces. The house 
of clay is only to be kept in such repair as to 
be presentable and comfortably habitable till 
abandoned. It was not made to resist earth- 
quakes nor time. Only the every-day storms 



164 HALF TINTS. 

and ills may be averted or cured. The one 
great shock or poison which shatters or rots 
the structure, the wisest cannot forefend nor 
baffle. Therapeutics, unfortunately, is not so 
exact as anatomy. Bones and veins and mus- 
cles, the same in all men, once discovered, are 
facts, and, with the aid of chloroform, the med- 
ical carpenter may cut and saw his poor fellow 
with certainty. But the million influences of 
climate and appetite and passion upon these 
human bodies, as varied by predispositions and 
habits and ambitions as they are numerous, 
are past finding out mathematically, and some- 
times may only be guessed at, as the turns of 
the stock-market, or the whims of insanity. 
From the beginning, notwithstanding, the best 
intellects have been worn and wasted to dis- 
cover symptoms and invent remedies. In their 
zeal and preoccupation, pondering the possible, 
they naturally overlooked the inevitable. In 
their ardor and sincerity, what wonder that 
they attempted to fasten by terms and theories 
what was too illusive for apprehension without 



POOR BODIES. 165 

them, and what wonder that they founded, and 
dying men patronized, schools to utilize and 
perpetuate it. Upon a sea of speculation, in 
doubt and darkness, with only a few obscure 
truths bundled into theories, they confidently 
worked to conclusions, but with as little real 
knowledge of the mystery they sought to ex- 
plore as the squirrel displays of navigation, 
who, upon a bit of wood, with his tail spread, 
floats before the wind. Down the ages, with 
the drift of superstition, have descended the 
little fragments of fact, till the accumulation 
is voluminous. Every school of medicine has 
its philosophers and zealots; and of its nu- 
merous practitioners, those who do not defend 
it with ardor are exceptional. The system 
they have espoused must be right till aban- 
doned. Wedded to mercury, cold water, or 
infinitesimals, they are sworn systematically 
to prescribe, whatever the accident or ex- 
tremity. "Wholly committed and in earnest, 
professional pride becomes an essential of 
personality, and a certain symptom demands 



166 HALF TINTS. 

a certain remedy, or risks the character. A 
dose to the grain is defended by the proud 
physician as the honor of his household, and 
the sturdiness of opinion which such cham- 
pionship of minutiae is apt to beget becomes 
as often inconvenient as disagreeable. Such 
a man will not be trifled with. Sincere, and 
devoted to his calling, he will not accommo- 
date himself to pretences nor whims. A pro- 
fessional call means sober business, and his 
sense of duty commands candor. If indolence 
or indulgence or vice be the cause of ailment, 
he frankly announces and characterizes it. 
The cherished habits, appetites, or desires, 
mast be abandoned before he can begin a 
cure of their result. Trained to directness of 
expression as well as of thought, he can hardly 
describe their effect upon the body without 
suggesting their blight inevitably and forever 
upon the character. A faithful physician he 
believes should be an honest man, and conceal- 
ment or assumed ignorance he will not admit 
inseparable from the art of healing. He will 



POOR BODIES. 167 

continue to visit a-foot, and live in a hired 
house, rather than be rich at the expense of 
integrity and self-respect. 

That interesting character to whom I refer 
is of another sort and purpose. Consulting 
. only his convictions, he might belong to any 
of the schools, or none of them, confessedly. 
His views are material and commercial, and 
he is willing that the money his profession 
brings him should measure his ability. Strong 
beliefs would be inconvenient, and might mount 
him upon a hobby. Shrewdly occupied with 
other people's hobbies, one of his own would 
be sure to embarrass him. The thing of all 
things he would avoid is a conviction which 
could make him dogmatic. Free from attack 
through having nothing abstract to defend, he 
readily secures the patronage of every folly 
by not opposing it. Cognizant of the higher 
impulses of humanity, he does not forget that 
but one of many is controlled by them, and 
his vigilance for the main chance adapts him 
to the multitude. The patrons of his choice 



168 HALF TINTS. 

would be above the average of men if lie could 
have enough of them ; but as society at large 
will not be elevated to his standard of fancy, 
he contents and secures himself by accepting 
it as it is. He prefers to pitch himself to the 
common rather than the moral sense, that 
being the more apprehensible and merchant- 
able. Souls that are regular and strong in 
themselves, he believes, with Montaigne, are 
so rare as not justly to have name nor place 
among men, and considers the time nearly lost 
in endeavoring to please them. Besides, to 
attain and maintain their altitude of reason 
would require a hard and constant effort of 
intellect, and would unfit him for close obser- 
vation and appropriation of the instincts and 
artifices of the general level, where the genius 
of the shopkeeper is the standard. The great 
are exceptional, and may not easily be turned 
to account, while the ordinary are everywhere, 
and ever in market. The little things of life 
engross it, and with them he must deal. Every- 
body is to have a last sickness, but he would 



POOR BODIES. 169 

prefer never to have a patient in that extrem- 
ity. The numerous little ailments which annoy 
life more than they endanger it, but which 
steadily swell the doctor's bank balance, are 
easily manageable by simple remedies, if in- 
deed they need medical treatment at all. To 
these his arts are adapted, to be estimated 
and perpetuated in running accounts. If only 
so fortunate as to be able to confine his prac- 
tice to them, the life of every patient would 
attest his ability. Alas, he cannot always 
dally with the trifling; he must sometimes 
face the terrible ; but in the dreadful extrem- 
ity he finds safety in counsel. Only sharing 
the responsibility, his reputation cannot be 
much endangered. No matter if the dying 
man still trusts in him; the poor fellow has 
received the last visit ; the living friends who 
surround are to be retained as patrons; and 
it might be fatal if he alone were remembered 
with the calamity. 

So perfect a type of his class, Jack, is this 
man, it were necessary you should see him 



170 HALF TINTS, 

often, and know him as well as any one may, 
justly to admire him. If yon were here I 
could almost wish you a little sick to secure 
you a close observation. To know him as 
your friends know you, no man can ; but most 
persons who meet him think they know him 
perfectly at once. Devoting himself to the 
study and use of their weaknesses, he acquires 
a peculiar influence over them. As a hunter, 
he pursues his game with a full pack of pas- 
sions and intuitions trained to his will. Men, 
he reasons, are indolent and ambitious, with 
instincts and impulses ever ready to supply 
the lack of labor and exalted purposes, and 
unawares they become artful and mean. 
Habitually deceiving, they expect deception, 
and prefer it. The skeleton truth is distaste- 
ful. Dressed according to mode, it is only 
presentable. His study is to find out what 
will suit, and to adapt himself accordingly. 
He takes the hue of whatever is contiguous. 
He dances with them that dance ; puffs pre- 
sumption ; apologizes for ignorance ; excuses 



POOR BODIES. 171 

hypocrisy; fawns to avarice; applauds every 
device of ugliness to entrap beauty ; listens to 
gossip in a manner to excite new wonder ; 
winks at slander with a kindly smirk ; gives a 
roguish twinkle at fashionable pruriency and 
villany ; swells his cheeks expanding evan- 
escent bubbles which complacency and pride 
have invented to conceal their emptiness ; in 
a word, is ever every thing to everybody, and 
never himself. He is too well drilled to fear 
an exposure of his semblances. He scents up 
characteristics, and assumes them so well, it 
may be said he improves them in the acting. 
An adept in counterfeiting, he is quick to 
detect counterfeits; and while his coin is so 
perfect as always to pass, society can never im- 
pose upon him a baubee which is not genuine. 
If thrown with violence against angularity, 
his india-rubber character never receives a 
wound in the collision. The only individual 
he encounters to whom he cannot conform 
himself is that fortunately rare nuisance of 
well-bred society, ah artless map, with a clear 



172 HALF TINTS. 

eye for the truth, and a tongue to utter it; 
who is so indelicate and uncivil as not to con- 
fine himself to representations on the stage of 
life, but obtrudes into the green-room, and sees 
the faults and follies of the actors, and the 
difficulties and miseries of rehearsal ; who 
strips philosophy of cant; poetry of extrava- 
gance ; painting of unnatural tints ; dogmatism 
of ignorance ; elegance of mockery ; distinc- 
tion of props ; diplomacy of ambition ; in fine, 
sees society as it is, undraped by the fictions 
which pass for society itself. Such a man to 
him is fearful. In such a presence, his smiles 
are ghastly, and his sinuous tongue shrinks 
into coil, and only hisses. 

To a philosopher, like yourself, who could 
observe without impatience, so perfect an 
achievement in art would be pleasing. I 
think of you always when he makes my wife 
a visit. "Women, you know, even the best of 
them, will have their way in some things; 
always in the choice of a physician. The 
points of merit must be invisible to our reason. 



POOR BODIES. 173 

I will not think my wife so weak a creature as 
to be charmed by liis graces ; she thinks too 
much of me to believe in them wholly. His 
rich equipage and faultless manners cannot be 
all that she sees. There must be a soul of 
sympathy or ken of wisdom somewhere or 
somehow visible, or her fine sense has failed 
her for once. One scene I shall remember 
while memory of her remains to me. The 
poor sufferer had been pulled and torn by 
pain all night, and in the morning, when the 
paroxysm left her, she was exhausted. Feebly 
but often she looked at the clock, anxiously 
counting the minutes till the doctor's arrival. 
At length he came, and his presence seemed 
a benediction. His confidential manner and 
sublime tact compounded a remedy above the 
skill of the apothecary. His few words, less 
interrogative than magnetic, seemed to reach 
the source of anguish, and run through the 
nerves with vitalizing energy. His hand 
touched her temple and caressed a pitiful lock 
as gently as could sunshine or zephyr. Not a 



174: HALF TINTS. 

word of drugs ; but a few well-chosen ones of 
to-morrow and rejoicing promise. Closing the 
west window a little, and opening the south- 
ern as much, the air was of a softer climate. 
Hopeful and composed, with a sweet torpor 
upon her eyelids, he left her — as unconsciously 
to her as her consciousness. For three hours 
she slept like a baby, and awoke a new spirit. 
The scene for some reason reminded me, and 
always reminds me, of an old experience; 
perhaps they may illustrate each other. Not 
at all well, I could not improve on account 
of business anxieties. My first venture, upon 
the success of which my whole future seemed 
to depend, had reached a crisis, and my emo- 
tions were in a tumult, and had been for days. 
All my energies had been expended to secure 
a favorable result, and I could only wait. Not 
that I needed his skill, but to be occupied for 
a few long minutes, I had dropped into the 
easy-chair of the village barber and yielded 
to his pleasant manipulations. Unexpectedly 
and suddenly I fell into a profound sleep, and 



POOR BODIES. 175 

when I awoke, an liour afterward, the faithful 
and kindly son of Ham was still at work, but 
with a fan — meantime having gently lifted me, 
chair and all, between the open door and win- 
dow, and disposed my legs and arms for the 
long forgetfulness. Ever since the world has 
looked brighter. The scheme of bnsiness 
worked well ; but its failure, and all the skill 
or ridicule of learned doctors conld never have 
made me forget or underrate the thoughtful 
and feeling barber. 

Men and women, Jack, are poor creatures, 
and do not care to be stared at through micro- 
scopes. Their hearts sore, and faculties weary, 
they want to be humored and petted. In 
every man's heart are there not apartments 
forever locked, the keys forever lost, into which 
he himself never enters but by a skeleton? 
The central motive which has harmonized the 
efforts of a life, and the misfortune which has 
tempered it, are not to be hunted with the 
realist's dark-lantern, nor spitted for scientific 
scrutiny. Personality is within the life as the 



176 HALF TINTS. 

world sees it, and not to be invaded if all the 
resources of that life can protect it. Of this 
no one can be more perfectly aware than the 
fashionable doctor. To appearances he is most 
considerate and respectful, while with the con- 
cealed and unutterable he makes merchandise. 
A large proportion, and the most substantial, 
of his patients, for instance, are only growing 
old, but they submit to be drugged and drugged, 
rather than once to be told the wholesome 
truth. The slight weaknesses and aches, as nat- 
ural as gray hairs and dim eyesight, pride of life 
and the physician's arts dignify into illnesses. 
Thin locks and spectacles are natural enough, 
and well enough, and rather becoming; but 
flattening muscles and cooling circulation are 
results of oyer-work or imprudence, and may 
be restored to roundness and comfortable tem- 
perature. The doctor's wise prescription is 
higher living and heavier flannel, with pow- 
ders and drops now and then as alteratives 
and tonics, and just soon enough, to a visit, 
he conducts the delicate case, as they say, to 



POOR BODIES. 



177 



a favorable issue. The air of southern Europe 
is recommended if his patient's patience seems 
failing, or if, as the real case may be, the ill 
taste of a stubborn husband is to be corrected. 
Many of his patients, who are given to gayety 
and irregular hours, are too frail to bear chil- 
dren, and his bare hint of the fact is of profit 
to the monster in a palace whose specialty 
is such cases. Expressionless eyes and dul- 
ness would contrast with diamonds and thin 
dresses, and stimulants in every form are sug- 
gested to supply the needed lustre and spright- 
liness, and complete the harmony. Small 
potions at first are sufficient; and if gradual 
increase of quantity result unfortunately, the 
misfortune is disease, to be treated by a still 
further increase of the cause as a remedy. If 
the public voice be silenced by the presence of 
crime in so many households ; if brothels spring 
up palatially in desirable streets ; if hospitals 
multiply to exhaust the public purse ; the fash- 
ionable doctor, who is the genius and patron 
of them all, is secure in his fame and opulence. 



8* 



XIII. 



POOR SOULS. 



XIII. 

POOR SOULS, 

But the creature-comfort of all — the sweet 
meat of the turtle — ripened and seasoned to 
the appetite of worldliness — is the fashionable 
parson. Prized according to price, as every 
other luxury, he is solace and nourishment to 
the fortunate who can purchase. In all the 
variety of his genus, he is the rarity and per- 
fection. 

The poor have the gospel preached to them 
according to their ways and wants, and taste 
is less a requisite with them than earnestness. 
Their ' school of wisdom 5 being the ' school 
of misery, 5 they are prepared for honesty, even 
if it goes to the sources of badness, and are 



182 HALF TINTS. 

not disappointed if it grates as it goes. Their 
lives being simple and transparent, in any soft 
or ingenious disguise to cover or excuse self- 
ishness, they suspect deceit or cowardice. 
Life has been too much in earnest, and every 
little want of it too much a fact, to let them 
long or very far from its realities. Every 
muscle and pore has too habitually paid the 
price of every necessity to permit them igno- 
rance of intrinsic values. If frugality in them 
has been a ' substitute for ambition, 5 it has 
taught them to esteem humanity. If sacrifice 
has put a high value upon their little accumu- 
lations, dependence has taught them a will- 
ingness to share them. The Saviour, in the 
midst of the multitude, saw the poor widow 
making her way to the treasury to deposit her 
two mites— ' all that she had, even all her 
living.' The lifting eye of thankfulness, drop- 
ping a tear when lifted, is easily fixed upon 
the Throne, at whose right hand there is ful- 
ness forever. To the broken-hearted and pen- 
itent, graces of speech but obscure, and strong 



POOR SOULS. 183 

figures weaken. To them, as to poor Yorick, 
to preach, to show the extent of the preacher's 
reading, or the subtleties of his wit, tinselled 
over with a few words which glitter, but con- 
vey little light and less warmth, is a dishonest 
use of the poor single half hour in a week 
which is put in his hands ; 'tis not preaching 
the gospel, but himself. They would rather 
have five words directed point-blank to the 
heart. To them, language, as every other 
help, is so limited to necessity, that in express- 
ing a want they as little think of the words 
as of the atmosphere by which they see. A 
good word and kind hand, offered in fellow- 
ship and fraternity, will do more to ease the 
heavy burden and widen the narrow road, 
than all the arts of rhetoric. Ever consciously 
dependent, they but the more securely trust 
to guidance, and esteem this hard life an ad- 
vantage if it but keep them in the way to a 
better. Misfortune and penury, driven into 
side-streets and obscurity, are warmed by the 
sun, and specially blest. The little mission 



184 HALF TINTS. 

church is the temple of the New Jerusalem. 
The best viands of the beggar are the offal of 
excess. The last picking is sweetest, being 
nearest the bone. Opulence, which denies 
itself nothing, feels independent, and trusts in 
its ability to supply itself with every thing. 
Indigence, which has nothing, is grateful for 
any thing. Plenty is full-handed, and feels it 
can make its own terms. Poverty reaches an 
empty hand to God, and is so near the Giver 
as to get and realize all the good of the gift. 

A thousand times you have read The De- 
serted Village, and as often turned back to read 
again that best description in literature of a 
good minister. If enough like him had lived 
upon the earth to preach all the sermons, and 
solemnize all the marriages, and baptize all the 
children, and compose all the loved ones in their 
last sleep, what a different world this would be. 

A man he wa s to all the country dear ; 

And passing rich with forty pounds a year. 

Kemote from towns he ran his godly race, 

Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change, his place ; 



POOR SOULS. 185 

Unpractised he to fawn, or seek for power 
By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour. 
Far other aims his heart had learned to prize — 
More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise. 

At church, with meek and unaffected grace, 
His looks adorned the venerable place ; 
Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, 
And fools who came to scoff remained to pray. 

To relieve the wretched was his pride, 
And even his failings leaned to virtue's side — 
But in his duty, prompt at every call, 
He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all : 
And, as a bird each fond endearment tries 
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies, 
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, 
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way. 

You and I are both old enough, to remem- 
ber those heroes in the ministry, who went 
with the axe and civilization into the forests ; 
who climbed mountains, swam rivers, and 
fought savages and wild beasts and hunger, 
to carry the "Word to the careless or erring 
or wretched in every cabin. How different, 
think you, were they, and are their successors 



186 HALF TINTS. 

generally, from the petted favorite of a rich 
church in an opulent city, whose membership 
and attendants sail the dizzying maelstrom of 
fashion, and move omnipotently in the mys- 
teries of markets and corporations. The old 
metal of orthodoxy, in the same tone and 
measure for ages, has hammered out impres- 
sively : ' Saved by grace — saved by grace — 
saved by grace ; ' but the full chime in the 
splendid temple, in tones agreeable to ears 
accustomed to melody, liberally varies it : 
' Taste — taste— saved by taste — saved by taste.' 
The occupant of the carved pulpit, ■ whose 
wants are only imaginary, kneels upon cush- 
ions of velvet, and thanks gracious Heaven for 
having made the circumstances of all mankind 
so extremely happy. 5 Material demands upon 
him being paid by checks upon his banker, he 
is profoundly ignorant of the petty shifts of 
the multitude. Here and there, in the pews 
nearest the pulpit, repose in fresh raiment and 
elegance, representatives of every institution 
of finance and commerce, and their joint pos- 



POOR SOULS. 187 

sessions impress him with the fulness of benefi- 
cence. To illustrate his theme, he is not 
limited to average experience, but is expected 
to range beyond and above it. He is under- 
stood to know the world in an enlarged way ; 
and if his figures or examples suggest the 
successes or power of his hearers, their com- 
placency is stimulated if their hearts are not 
softened. He is not to shock by an exposure 
of subtlety which circumvents, or combination 
which oppresses, but to soothe by a glittering 
exhibition of ends and attainments. The pos- 
session of money, in whatever prodigious quan- 
tity, is not to be questioned, but only the love 
of it. A little ingenuity will comfort the 
possessor by suggesting his expenditures, and 
make him for the time being as conspicuous 
in the sanctuary as his equipage makes him in 
the avenue. Wretches, in degradation and 
sores, are not to be exposed to eyes accus- 
tomed to beauty and plenitude, but the great 
establishment provided for them is displayed 
and admired exhaustingly in all the terms of 



188 HALF TINTS. 

descriptive architecture. The rheumy mendi- 
cant is at home in the beautiful hospital, 
happy with his fellows, and generous taxation, 
not importunity, sustains him. Cases of indi- 
vidual suffering are covered from view by the 
general provision, the sight of which would 
only disgust or humiliate. Discipline turns 
the key, and the tract society preaches by 
assortment in bundles. Eeduced gentility, 
the only respectable wretchedness, too proud 
for the mission, and too helpless to risk soli- 
tude, is not forbidden the temple, but fills a 
corner and enjoys patronage. A smiling or 
waving welcome is generously paid in conde- 
scension. Self-sacrifice a habit, the means of 
grace are cheap when purchased by obeisance. 
Abasement, to the proud, is so allied with 
humility, that the hungry soul is nourished 
by it and exalted. The old path is pleasant, 
and the old company solacing, even if trailing 
behind at a respectful distance. The bruised 
heart seems most at home with those who 
know its bruises. Woe of every sort needs a 



POOR SOULS. 189 

certain ear to hear it, and will utter itself to 
such, if but to be pitied. The light of dia- 
monds is most coveted by those who once 
reigned in its splendor. But for these poor 
ones are not the ministrations of the beneficed 
divine adapted. His tones are pitched to the 
ears of those they beseech, to whom he owes 
all, and from whom he expects even more. 
Their courtly presence he has enjoyed till 
their moral atmosphere has become his own, 
and his passions flow much in the same cur- 
rents with theirs. To apply Massillon, ' he is 
naturally attentive to refrain from every thing 
calculated to make them melancholy ; eager 
to conciliate their affections, and make them 
pleased with him ; careful to speak to them 
only the language of peace, confidence, and 
mercy ; and instead of frightening them on 
account of their sins, encourages them, and 
in his mildness furnishes them a resource 
against the secret alarms of conscience.' Tt 
were too much to expect him to pass from the 
gay saloons of fashion and mammon to the 



190 HALF TINTS. 

feet of the altar, ' there to pray for himself 
and his people, there to avert the righteous 
anger, there to deplore the wickedness of a 
world he has just applauded, and in which 
he has taken part, and there to attend upon 
the holy mysteries with that silence of the 
senses, that profound recollection, that reli- 
gious terror, that majestic gravity, and that 
calmness of heart and mind which are neces- 
sary in the spiritual employment of the min- 
istry. 5 

His discourses are essays to gratify taste, 
adorned by allusions to pictures and orna- 
ments and usages, which his hearers are just 
now enjoying ; or arguments to qualify and 
ennoble worldliness, which possesses and in- 
vests them ; or rhapsodies to solace their indif- 
ference to uncertainties and perils, which their 
busy lives of idleness or occupation give them 
no time to contemplate. Once a year the 
golden rule is dwelt upon, to harmonize and 
conciliate commercial niceties. Refinement 
and speciousness may display themselves upon 



POOR SOULS. 191 

so sober a generality. If not a vague abstrac- 
tion, it may be only relative in its application 
to life, as honesty in the common sense is not 
integrity. Honor is the practicable and neces- 
sary rule. The speculator may have it, and 
trade by it, and reap advantages from it, 
even if his ingenuous friend be ruined by 
his scheme. Thief he may morally be, and 
a beggar his dupe, but the contract must be 
fulfilled, and justice indorse it. As the ethics 
to govern in the settlement between man and 
his Maker, with character only in judgment, 
the golden rule is unquestionable, but not in 
the court of the money-changers, where honor 
alone must gild the edges of promises. With 
the motives of the heart God may deal. Man 
must have his due. 

Love and mercy, alternating, are the usual 
and encouraging themes. Conscience, in the 
very crises of alarm, has its terrors converted 
into blessings, by believing consciousness of 
crime an awakening of contrition. The 
extremity of evil appears the beginning of 



192 HALF TINTS. 

forgiveness. A life wasted by vices drops to 
be caught in the arms of virtue, and winged 
hopes are given it by mercy it has only out- 
raged. Man is abased and degraded that love 
and mercy may exalt him. Evil is a possible 
merit if good is to come of it. The use of 
man to employ a God. Creature and Creator 
cooperating. Self-love and the attributes of 
Deity harmonized. 

He is a pretty preacher for young people. 
His manner moves them like the bursting 
spring. His similes are of buds and blossoms 
and fresh verdure. His soft words and gentle 
gestures winnow fragrance. He expands a 
flower in advancing to his climax. His bloom- 
ing virtues inspire goodness, as modest Pic- 
ciola enforced wisdom. His soft cambric a 
moment obscures his eyes, as the light snow 
sometimes conceals the violet; but they get 
new sweetness from tears, as increased fra- 
grance results from bruising. Young maidens, 
blooming with innocence and beauty, and lus- 
trous with love of every thing lovable, feel a 



POOR SOULS. 193 

flush unmoved before by coarser monitors, and 
aspire afresh to beatitudes just ready for them. 
The beautiful world, never so beautiful as 
painted by the beautiful preacher, dissolves 
in contemplation, and paradise opens and sur- 
rounds them and all — the dear divine in the 
very midst, as Beatrice appeared in the midst 
of the great snow-white rose, transfixing her 
illustrious lover. 

His accuracy and variety of taste make 
him a connoisseur in every thing pertaining to 
colors and fabrics. At home everywhere 
where there is elegance, contrasts and har- 
monies have trained him to refinement of 
observation, and he is at once the artist and 
arbiter in perplexity. As a relaxation from 
labor, and to gather resources for the enter- 
tainment and instruction of his people, he has 
travelled the Old World, and seen edifices and 
pictures and costumes, and his perception of 
effects is acute and unerring. His indorse- 
ment of the style of a house, or the beauty of 
a landscape, or the trimming of a gown, is 



194 HALF TINTS. 

assurance of grandeur or value or tastefulness. 
His ethics in the pulpit and aesthetics in the 
drawing-room are alike acceptable and infal- 
lible. His fine sense of fitness was illustrated 
in the choice of a text for his trial sermon : In 
my Father's house are many mansions. His 
novel treatment delighted the cultivated pew- 
owners, and he was chosen at once, leaving 
the little matter of salary for himself to deter- 
mine. Orthodox, by the severest test, as far 
as he went, his sense of architecture and appor- 
tionment was refreshing. The travelled portion 
of his audience were reminded, by the exterior 
he drew, of every renowned structure they had 
seen, and the more exclusive were delighted 
by his allotments. Delicate he was, and dis- 
criminating, to the limit of refinement, but his 
standard of excellence was not so obscure as 
not to be sufficiently obvious. Degrees of 
happiness were determined by development, 
and that was easy of interpretation. Bliss 
they had understood before to be relative. En- 
joyment, as a rule, is measured by capacity. 



POOR SOULS. 195 

Incongruity would mar the pleasure even of 
heaven. Birds of the same plumage have the 
same song, and would lose their beauty and 
melody by ill assortment. If on earth division 
is difficult and temporary, in heaven it must 
be inevitable and eternal. Beatitude would 
be qualified if not immutable. Happiness 
•above must have been defined from the foun- 
dation of the world, as continual jostling would 
unsettle it. If poor bodies, in faded robes, 
avoid their betters here, arbitrary mixture 
hereafter would be oppression. The theory 
of fitness and likes must solve eternal justice 
and harmony. Then the appointments of the 
preacher were as tasteful as his apportionment. 
Every mansion was differently adorned, and 
earthly upholstery was shamed by his supernal 
fancy. The mistresses of mansions received 
new views of furnishing and ornamentation ; 
at the same time they were delighted that 
in so many things their taste was indorsed. 
In some details he seemed even to describe 
their own super-terrestrial habitations. Passing 



196 HALF TINTS. 

with his imagination from one blissful com- 
partment to another, they seemed at home in 
their own parlors and drawing-rooms. Their 
own gossamer lace curtains, imported by Stew- 
art, the breezes of paradise fluttered in their 
faces ; and their own beautiful velvets caressed 
their footsteps over coverings, not made by 
hands, eternal. 

In society he is indispensable and charm- 
ing, and always at ease where angels are 
sometimes constrained. He pervades and 
tones the atmosphere like a perfume. His 
presence harmonizes discords and compounds 
incompatibles. He contributes of his graces 
and borrows of its splendors. The gleanings 
of the week are a resource for Sunday. Like 
a fish, he gathers food from the living surface ; 
like a drooping flower, he revives in the sun- 
shine; like a wasting soil, he lies fallow for 
refreshment. Yelvet and damask soothe from 
his brain its fever. His hand, wearied by 
composition, rests itself by dalliance. His 
mind is relieved of weighty reflection by 



POOR SOULS. 197 

social philosophy. The long mornings are 
shortened by confidences. His ear an un- 
questioned receptacle, he knows more of the 
mysteries of a household than the householder. 
Receiving of the gushing tenderness of the 
lambs of his flock, he unconsciously leads 
them into green pastures. He composes their 
ambitions or jealousies or fears, and writes 
them substantially his followers. They are 
bound by ties of sacredness, and his honor is 
at once their stay and sacrament. He is 
indeed the good shepherd, with the indis- 
pensable crook and oil, and his protection 
and consolation are the green thymy nooks 
of security and promise. 

His relations with society are closer than 
the physician's, and his services more solemn 
and responsible. With the poor body, for a 
few days or years, the former has to deal, 
before following it to the grave; the latter 
has charge of the imperishable, which he must 
meet in judgment, and answer for. Every 
taint upon it will appear distinctly in the 



198 HALF TESTTS. 

luminous light of the great day, and every one 
lie has given it will glare upon him. If he 
has soothed the conscience to sleep by noxious 
sympathy or advice, it will pronounce against 
him in its terrible awakening. If he has 
stimulated any corrupting desire, in hunger 
or remorse it will forever haunt him. If he 
has concealed any wholesome truth, it will 
flash upon him retributively at the great un- 
covering. If he has encouraged a lie, its 
endless effects will discover themselves in con- 
demnation. If he has pandered to the verge 
of hypocrisy — invented philosophies to flatter 
worldliness — confused worship with ceremony 
— courted power without suggesting respon- 
sibility — helped to degrade integrity to the 
standard of commercial honor — exalted money 
without regard to the means which obtained 
it — encouraged wine and denounced drunken- 
ness — extolled prodigality and deplored bank- 
ruptcy — admired costly raiment and bewailed 
demoralization — cautioned youth, with only 
manhood, against marriage, and warned him 



POOR SOULS. 199 

of the strange woman — counselled with ambi- 
tions mothers, and inveighed against slander — 
if all or any of these things he has done, he 
has debauched his holy office, and the mean- 
est man or woman he has helped to ruin, 
will forever — happy or wretched — in sorrow 
-lament that he ever existed. 



XIV. 



AND SO FORTH, 



XIY. 

AND SO FORTH. 

Creature-comforts, Jack, more than are 
wholesome, are the devil. At least, they are 
the lap of Delilah. They emasculate and 
smother. Manliness, the thing every man 
should stand for, grows without them. Strong 
roots are made by strong winds. Careful cul- 
ture and supports give symmetry to the shrub 
in the conservatory, but the oak of commerce 
grows alone, amid storms. To the rude soil and 
the tempest it owes its texture, and it will bear 
the tests of the seas. You have seen how the 
branches of trees by the coast or on the moun- 
tain are sometimes forced by the merciless 
wind to grow one way ; but the wilful roots 



204 HALF TINTS. 

combine defiantly and force themselves another. 
Character is so much resistance and endurance. 
You remember the indifference of one of our 
schoolfellows to the freezing November mud, 
and what a hero he was in the war. Bare- 
footed generally, he was always at the head 
of his class. His pitiful luncheon at noontime 
kept him but a minute from his book. He 
would be a man, and even poverty helped 
him. If we jeered, it was cautiously. His 
calm persistency shamed us. His way was 
his own, and nothing could divert him. He 
advanced as if fate led and all invisible powers 
beckoned. The master even, stern as he was, 
was subordinate, and seemed never happy but 
in his service. There is nothing more accre- 
tive or cumulative than manliness. Every 
trial gives a new resource, and every conquest 
a new power. With each achievement accrues 
a premium. Growth is obvious, and calcula- 
ble, and applicable. Every one, boy or man, 
has read Robinson Crusoe, but every one has 
not thought why the simple narrative is so 



AND SO FORTH. 205 

interesting. To the curious boy it is the 
adventures of a man in novel and trying sit- 
uations ; to the thoughtful adult it is the 
analysis and display of human powers and 
resources. It is metaphysics illustrated in 
intellect on trial. In straits we are to see if 
the solitary man is to survive a hero. "With- 
out ordinary helps, he is to supply himself by 
invention. He masters extremity, and appears 
noble in achievement. He is exalted without 
applause or patronage. Humanity is vindi- 
cated and sublimated. ' It is a poor and dis- 
graceful thing, not to be able to reply, with 
some degree of certainty, to the simple ques- 
tions, What will you be ? "What will you do ? ' 
To cut the cable and launch away from con- 
ventional restraints and helps, is the aspiration 
of every man at some time in life. His indi- 
viduality feels fettered and shorn. Before he 
consents to surrender and subordination, he 
aspires to be tried by trusts, and perils, and 
calamities. The natural man is radical, and 
is reluctant to believe his way not the best. 



206 HALF TINTS. 

He would show it, and make others walk in 
it. Quitting the belief that there is some- 
thing in him more than appears, is the first 
death. With it is interred his genius. A 
record of the solemn entombment is made in 
all the waste places it leaves. The coldest 
man who has read Alton Locke has felt a 
certain kinship to the hero. If he despised 
his theories, his memory was illumined by 
the lurid light of his enthusiasms. Mourn- 
fully were reanimated the aspirations which 
spent themselves upon restraints which at 
one time encaged him. True manhood is 
shy of conventionality and patronage. It is 
self-asserting, and is rarely arm-in-arm, but 
for recreation. It gives and takes of its own 
will. It husbands by determining without 
counsel. Its reserve conciliates what it may 
appropriate. The average it can drop to when 
not. avoidable, and as readily rise out of when 
not indispensable. It is democratic, essen- 
tially. It requires and permits, alike. While 
it chooses, it gives choice, without question. 



AND SO FORTH. 207 

Freedom it claims and allows, an immunity 
without gyves. A receptacle, it can wait 
to receive, and would not obstruct nor be 
obstructed. A week were not idle if it 
brought something, but a day would be 
wasted if employed upon nothings. Its free- 
dom is its strength, which modish subserv- 
iency acknowledges in obeisance. Its facul- 
ties are fitted for work by waiting for work 
worthy of them. Friction it likes, but not 
machine movement. The principles it would 
train to grooves are as virginal and unpolished 
as when spoken of God. True pleasure be- 
trays the same shyness and freedom. It is not 
to be caught and kept by arbitrary provision. 
Mansions, curtained by clouds, carpeted by 
woven sunbeams, perfumed by essences of 
every thing fragrant, filled by loveliest maid- 
ens on earth, could not lure it to stay forever. 
It would flutter unbidden into the terrestrial 
paradise, and fly away as wilfully into an 
attic, where only a desolate heart awaited it. 
While its angel-like presence in the brilliant 



208 HALF TINTS. 

saloon would be accepted the contribution of 
a natural guest, its visitation to the skyward 
chamber would be a gift of Heaven, an answer 
to despairing prayer, a compensation for all the 
unnumbered woes of a solitary human soul.— 
Men generally are as indolent as they can 
afford to be. Unless compelled, they do little 
which is useful, and utility is the crown of 
labor. Only now and then a high nature is 
created which works from love, and is content 
with a tithe of the harvest. Nine parts to 
mankind is a generous division, and only a 
great soul will spare so much. To such it is 
not a sacrifice ; his return is in multiplied 
blessings. Exemption from useful labor is the 
ambition or boast of nearly all. Trifling for 
selfish ends is therefore the business of most 
of those who can confine themselves to volun- 
tary effort. They are perverted by a misuse 
of means. They rely upon the adventitious, 
till the natural intrinsic resources deny them 
service. They go out of themselves for pleas- 
ure, and return to find themselves empty. 



AND SO FOBTH. 209 

They build palaces, and exist in them the 
victims of ceremony and servants. They buy 
books to adorn libraries, which satirize them. 
They buy pianos as ambitious ornaments, and 
patronize the opera. They educate their 
daughters expensively, and see them accept 
impertinence and imbecility for escorts and 
husbands. Their sons are indulged and pam- 
pered, till amusements are exhausted and 
occupation is purchased, to keep them respect- 
able. They ride in carriages so conspicuously 
elegant as to make them sacrifice comfort to 
propriety. Their horses represent so much 
capital that the weather and their health are 
consulted before using them. Their acquaint- 
ances are esteemed for the rank they have 
and give. Their houses are heated by fur- 
naces to secure a uniform temperature, and 
day and night they inhale a baked atmos- 
phere, and wonder at disturbed respiration. 
Pipes conduct cold and warm water into 
chambers and kitchen, and they take poison 
in all they drink and eat, and are surprised 



210 HALF TINTS. 

by palsy and the increase of nervous disorders. 
The wine-cellar, meant to be a depository of 
luxuries, becomes a resource against "wasting 
vitality. The laugh of the fields and the streets 
is reproduced in ghastly caricature behind the 
vari-colored goblets. A joke upon the high 
price of bread redeems a dullard, and the 
whole table from dulness. The children are 
cared for by nurses, and their natures modified 
by restraints and drugs, till feebleness and 
pitiful cries identify them. The doctor's visits 
are as indispensable as the baker's or hair- 
dresser's, and the household eat as they dose, 
by prescription. The priest drops in to solace 
the moments between drugging and dressing. 
Life is taken up by the endless round of arti- 
ficialities and their effects, till the struggles 
and wants of the million they deplore compare 
with them as blessings. — The inspiration of 
work is the spirit of life. Bread for the 
body, earned by the hardest, is ambrosia for 
the soul. Sweet for the sweat it costs, it is 
sweeter for the promise it gives. It satisfies 



AND SO FORTH. 211 

the appetite, but not the longing insatiable. 
The little feast is but a foretaste of fruition. 
The sickly atmosphere of affluence, tempered 
to tender throats and low enunciation, is gath- 
ered from cellars bordered by sewers, and 
would choke a healthy nature, exhausted and 
exhaustive by exertion. The great lungs of 
out-door labor inspire the upper air of heaven, 
and pant for inspirations from its source. 
To-morrow, on the way with the sun, will 
demand a full day's service, which to-day's 
fidelity must assure. To-morrow and to-mor- 
row, and then the day supernal, long enough 
for any longing, an unending harvest and 
holiday. — Making and earning money are 
different. Earning it is a reality ; making it 
a fiction. Money makes money ; labor earns 
it. Bonds, proverbially, like infants, do best 
by sleeping; labor must be wide awake, and 
faithful. A dollar, for ten hours in the sun, 
is precious ; a dollar, got in the dark, which 
cannot be accounted for, is worse than want. 
Knotted hands tell of the one; nimbleness 



212 HALF TINTS. 

or nothing tells of the other. — ¥e exalt and 
reverence the poet ; but a machine built from 
the ore of the mountain is as much a creation 
as an epic, and fills the imagination of the 
builder with poetic glories. "Who sings an 
immortal song may be jealous of the fame 
of him who trains the elements to pointing 
pins and sailing steamships. "Who has gone 
down, down among the machinery of the Great 
Eastern, and not felt a contempt for his buy- 
ing and selling and pleasuring occupations? 
Transfixed in the presence of tremendous 
power, the genius which discovered and tamed 
and trained it, loomed in transfiguration, and 
confused his memories of even Niagara and 
Yo-Semite. The mastery of the engines over 
the powers of the sea, overcame his arithmetic, 
and his bonds and ledgers burnt in the blaze 
of divinity. The slender crank which rules 
the waves, appeared to his feeble sense the 
fiat of Omnipotence. — Power is restful and 
invisible. It slivers the oak, and the splin- 
tered column is a memorial. The fragrant 



AND SO FORTH. 213 

wood is untainted by the mighty fluid, and 
smells not of experiment or spent forces. It 
rives the rock, and its fissured inscriptions 
Old Mortality may never deepen. Granite is 
blasted by gunpowder ; millstones are quarried 
by a gentler but mightier agent. "Wedges of 
dry wood are inserted, and water poured upon 
them. Over night they swell, and the precious 
rocks separate, noiselessly as death treads, free 
of any treacherous seam, and night and day, 
for years, like the mills of" God, they grind 
exceeding fine. Gray wrought silently and 
patiently for a thousand days upon a thousand 
words, and his matchless Elegy will be the 
expression of tenderness while any tongue is 
left to utter it, and will remain in memory 
when human tongues are silent and superfluous. 
Goldsmith, hungry and bailiff-hunted, in naked 
and desolate chambers, nursed through all the 
years of his prime, through all the sacred 
watches of consciousness, through the wasting 
agonies of waiting and depression, through 
the rare and rapturous moments of exalta- 



214 HALF TINTS. 

tion, his little romance of humanity, and 
would not let it go till bread, remorseless 
bread, demanded it. In the silent womb of 
profound human nature it was nourished by- 
tears and shaped by aspirations, and its birth 
was an epoch in life and literature. The 
tawdry in book-making has ever since been 
cautious of flaunting its meretricious arts, and 
the simple Yicar is accepted a model in narra- 
tive, and an encouragement to the pure human- 
ity it describes. — Simple nature is strongest, 
as simple work is healthiest. "Whirled in every 
little eddy, it would be weakened or wasted by 
purposeless motion, and would forget the in- 
spiration of currents. It would be fretted by 
the incidents of progress, and lose conscious- 
ness of destination. "Will, even, is perishable, 
if not in exercise. Purpose alone will nour- 
ish and exalt it. Amusements give it but a 
sickly growth, if they do not destroy it. Mere 
living is not a worthy object of life. True life 
is above the means which sustain it. Equa- 
nimity has an eye to results beyond the mo- 



AND SO FOETH. 215 

ment. Only the beasts that perish are content 
to be merely fed. Accessaries are not the 
purpose of a living picture, much less of life. 
The nervous tread of a true man means more 
than movement; it betrays absorbment, and 
looks to an end worth attaining. Idleness has 
every gait, and none long. Whim changes it. 
Nothing to do is the worst want of nature, 
and the most exhausting. It tests severely the 
best minds and morals. Ennui is weariness 
which has nothing to show. The tired hod- 
man counts the courses in the wall. Languor 
presses its nose against the pane, and dreamily 
questions the vitality it muses on and envies. 
Earned leisure is most relished. Pure joy is 
a costly article. Diamonds are worn outside ; 
jewels more brilliant beam within. A little 
time for pleasure is precious ; time for nothing 
else is burdensome. Accessaries contribute to 
happiness, but do not create it. The good 
goddess is jealous, and shy of rivals. She is 
reluctant to obtrude where gold and silver 
images are set up and worshipped in her 



216 HALF TINTS. 

stead. Her nature and movements are free, 
her robes flowing, and she requires room, and 
a generous welcome. — Job, by virtue of bis 
celibacy, is confined to no social set, and his 
opportunities for observation sometimes make 
him an authority. In one night he met three 
companies, made up of as many grades, as 
they are called, of society. The first was com- 
posed of persons who begin their labors with 
the sun, and seven o'clock was the early hour 
of meeting. The ladies were cheerful in sim- 
plicity and health and plain dresses, and plain 
cake and walnuts were the refreshments. The 
second was gathered from a class of greater 
pretensions and privileges, and met at the 
more respectable hour of nine. The ladies 
and gentlemen were more elaborately, dressed, 
but, by constraint and anxiety of manner, be- 
trayed uneasiness of position. The wine was 
tasted and discussed in a way which betrayed 
that it was not an accustomed beverage. The 
third assemblage was of the cream of the 
town, and was arriving and departing in state 



AND SO FORTH. 217 

carriages all the time from ten till early morn- 
ing. The ladies' dresses were so marvellous 
in novelty and texture and brilliancy, as to 
engross attention, and make the poor bodies in 
tliem pitiable. The costly refreshments were 
served by imported servants, undistinguish- 
able from guests in dress, manners, or lan- 
guage. Job is a ready and adaptable fellow, 
and enjoyed each ; but the first, he says, over 
the plate of walnuts and gingerbread, incom- 
parably most.— Simple, open natures, the light 
streams through. They are known and read 
of all men. They are individual, and never 
mistaken. They stand for ideas, and facts, 
and deeds. Rectitude identifies them ; ' cele- 
brated not by cries of joy, but by serenity, 
which is joy fixed or habitual.' The extrinsic 
is their foreground ; the inherent their per- 
spective, illimitable. Trial quickens and re- 
fines them. "Wants supply and pangs console 
them. Calamities become resources, treasures 
which do not waste, entailed for precious uses, 

perpetuated in goodness, or fame, or glory. 

10 



218 HALF TINTS. 

A poor mother, whom the care of an afflicted 
child has hurried to the grave, is crowned for 
her virtues where there is no suffering. Suf- 
fering little Charlotte Bronte, on her knee, by 
the firelight, in the cold parsonage, in painful 
characters, wrote herself into immortal narra- 
tive. Through all the rapture and agony of 
De Quincey's sublime and terrible Confes- 
sions, is heard the wail and cough of poor 
Ann. Milton, in the solitude of mortal dark- 
ness, with an eye strong enough to pierce the 
sun and rend the veil, saw the invisible and 
eternal, and painted them in shadows and 
glories unfading and immortal. 



XV. 



OUT OF THE WINDOW. 



XV. 

OUT OF THE WINDOW. 

A geeat city has a certain look of repose, 
but it is the repose of power. A million of 
people so crowded together as to be waked by 
the report of a columbiad, must of necessity 
be self-possessed, occupied, and in earnest. 
A hundred hands are in waiting for the con- 
tents of a pocket. Every one must ever be 
busy and on his guard or he will starve or 
be robbed. To look at the million-headed 
thing, you would think it abstracted or indif- 
ferent ; but such a convolution of sensations 
and sensibilities — want, plethora, jealousy, 
pride, ambition, hatred, conscious crime, de- 
spair — is a congeries of activities the slightest 



222 HALF TINTS. 

accident may agitate into a tumult. Its face 
may dimple at an inharmonious combination 
of colors in a . lady's attire, and a moment 
afterward it will see the grotesqnest of all 
things without a smile. At one time it will 
risk its security to avenge a slight, at another 
endure oppression without a whimper. A 
man dead in the street may not much more 
apparently attract its attention than a dead 
omnibus-horse. One person stopping to ask 
after the unfortunate man would excuse 
another to do the same, and the street would 
be blocked. His curiosity, if he has any, must 
be stayed till he gets the evening paper with 
his tea. Nevertheless, every novelty in every 
shop window is observed, and an aged woman 
or careless child cannot cross the dangerous 
street without fastening anxiously every eye. 
Let the prodigious mass alone, and it will 
walk round you; get in its way, and it will 
close upon you forever. 

In times of civil distress and extremity it 
most conspicuously displays its shrewdness and 



OUT OF THE WINDOW. 223 

power. When the nation is stirred, the material 
long buried and unrecognized works upward. 
The burdens put upon it make it active, ner- 
vous, and irrepressible. A victory or a defeat 
immediately employs all hands making figures. 
The blunder of an incompetent commander, 
and the tempest which scatters a fleet, are 
shrewdly and sagaciously discounted. The 
dealers in old clothes, decaying vegetables, 
poisoned drinks, and the precious metals, have 
profound theories, which make the schemes of 
the finance minister tremble and reel. The 
Sixth Ward and Wall Street agree, without 
consultation. They see in the diversion of 
vast numbers of able-bodied men into a new 
and wasting occupation, that the proportion 
between those who produce and those who con- 
sume must be violently affected. They know 
humanity, its necessities, and its instincts, and 
scent speculation insensibly. They accept in- 
flation as the inevitable compensation. They 
know that with the government for customer, 
necessitated to buy all the country's surplus, 



224 HALF TINTS. 

all they have to do is to mark every thing up, 
and let the certain results follow. They know 
that man, so essentially by taste, habit, and 
necessity, a getting animal, will not neglect 
so tempting an opportunity to combine against 
his only customer. A falling stone goes not 
more directly toward the centre of the earth 
than the instinct of a trading cit goes to the 
marrow of a money question. 

The weakness and power of society are 
exhibited in averages. It reposes in them, 
and is developed by them. Its classifications, 
apparently voluntary, are remorseless. All 
elements must come under control, and be 
solved. What is not fit for a square hole, 
must go into a round. Men are classified as 
trees, and individuals are apparently as alike 
as the leaves. Heads are so much on a level, 
that one above the rest is an obstruction. If 
a quiet blow will reduce it, down it goes. 
If it will not down, it is out of its grade, and 
must go into a higher. ' To live alone, is the 
chastisement of whoever will raise himself too 



OUT OF THE WINDOW. 225 

high. 5 What one knows, all are understood 
to know. "Weaknesses and interests are ac- 
commodated. No one has great advantages 
over another. What affects one, affects all. 
Protection to the individual is protection to 
the class. Plans he conld not originate are 
ready made. The flow of his life is in a com- 
mon channel. The full volume and steady 
current satisfy his efforts, and in the chances 
of movement float him momentarily to the 
top. Happy or wretched, he can touch a 
thousand like him. The best and worst of 
every thing are at hand, and contiguous. The 
virtues and vices are organized, and recruit- 
ing. The great town is the greatest, and he 
is a part of it. Helping to make it, he does 
something, and will not have lived in vain. 
He does not see how, but he would be missed. 
He expands with the bigness about him. The 
great assemblage makes him decorous. His 
conduct disgraces or dignifies it. He dresses 
to be always presentable to it. It keeps a 

guard over him while he sleeps and knows his 
10* 



226 HALF TINTS. 

footsteps when awake. The streets are lit for 
him. The parks are planted for him. The 
harbor is broader for his eye. An opera he 
may hear at the Academy for a guinea, or at 
the cathedral for a shilling. Church priv- 
ileges are purchasable or acceptable, at his 
will. The cemetery, where they bury in 
tombs and trenches, is one of his possessions. 
All are his as much as anybody's, and his 
without exciting anybody's envy or cupidity. 
Each illustrates the fable of the swimming 
apples, and applies it to the rest. The little 
instincts become so marvellously acute, that 
they assume the dignity of faculties. The 
faculties are so habitually in use, that they 
have the look of instincts. In the club, dul- 
ness becomes respectable. In the town meet- 
ing, the best heads are in the audience. In 
the exchange, audacity is wisdom. Wisdom 
itself is too dumb for an oracle. The street 
a man lives in fixes his social status. A man, 
good or great as he may be, is not great or 
good enough to make his rank. A house on 



OUT OF THE WINDOW. 227 

the avenue, a box at the opera, a pew in 
the church, an establishment for the park, are 
indices not to be gainsayed. Neither intel- 
ligence, nor taste, nor virtue, is requisite to 
possess them. Money, attainable by the worst 
as well as by the best, and by the worst means, 
secures them. Neither intellect nor purity is 
permitted advantages. Distinctions of God 
were obstructions to men. The standard is 
determined by possibility. It is the highest 
attainable by the majority. The universal hat 
is lifted in condescension and recognition. 

The average wisdom controls society. Pres- 
idents and assemblies and kings are its crea- 
tures, or exist by its sufferance. It is the 
gauge of civilization. It may appear too slow 
to the seer, or too fast for the philosopher, but 
the prescience of the one and timidity of the 
other are not often consulted. It gives a 
sympathizing ear to the fervid thoughts of 
reformers and enthusiasts, cooling and util- 
izing them by diffusion. It takes from the 
wearied eye and nerve-shaken hand of the 



228 HALF TINTS. 

inventor his invention, and puts it to work in 
the fields and seas. It may have its whimsi- 
calities, but they are the recreations and gam- 
bols of power. So generally and intensely 
preoccupied and absorbed by its occupations, 
it is but natural that sometimes a little child 
should lead it. Engaged in emancipating 
races, it finds time to fill the shop-windows with 
caricatures of the grotesque side of the tre- 
mendous process. The few, consciously strong 
or presumptuous, who have been helped up- 
ward by its generosity, may fret that it will 
not always continue to aid and elevate them. 
The roominess and freedom above are in such 
contrast with the jostling and competition 
below, that they cry out for prerogatives. 
Democracy is good while its uses can be 
turned to account, but when independence of 
it is sought and fails, it is complained of as 
agrarian. Its favoritism is fickle and quali- 
fied. It delights to scatter its gifts, and limit 
their tenure to subordination. Individuals 
may be its favorites until they assume to be, 



OUT OF THE WINDOW. 229 

when they are not. The rights it would 
secure to each, are not incompatible with the 
rights of any. It aims to elevate every citi- 
zen ; not so much for personal benefit as for 
public use. It designs opportunity to all, 
rather than advantages to any. It means that 
every man shall have a fair chance to make 
his own way. Scholarship is not the end; 
but peaceful and enlightened society, gov- 
erned by humane and beneficent laws. 

Demonstrations which sometimes appear 
revolutionary and suicidal, prove but detec- 
tive police movements for self-preservation. 
Masses sometimes seem infatuated by dan- 
gerous demagogues until thoroughly made 
acquainted with their designs, when the mis- 
chief is exposed, and the mischief-makers are 
overwhehned. The ready attention given to 
ambitious factionists beguiles them to ruin. 
If the public ear can be so easily had, why 
not its strong right hand, with a dagger in it ? 
Thousands are got to subscribe a compact of 
defiance of authority, and the leaders in the 



230 HALF TINTS. 

scheme of treason are confident of its suc- 
cess. The roll of names attains an immeas- 
urable length, and the time for indiscrimi- 
nate slaughter of loyalty arrives. The signal 
agreed upon and perfectly understood is given, 
when the whole devilish plot appears a failure 
to its inventors. Those enrolled to participate 
in the parricidal crime, expose and identify 
their leaders, join in exultation at their dis- 
grace and ruin, and a purer patriotism is 
established. Desperate disorganizers misin- 
terpret public impatience. Their own hearts 
corrupted, and bent upon disruption and rev- 
olution, they assume as much perfidy and 
baseness in those who listen to and seem to 
sympathize with them. Popular discontent 
cannot easily be organized into revolt. An 
attempt to organize it, while a particle of 
gratitude or hope remains, will only quicken 
a remembrance of benefits, and warm the 
common heart to a more fervid attachment. 
Once put upon its guard, no temptation can 
seduce it. 



OUT OF THE WINDOW. 231 

In the natural tendency of society to 
average itself is manifested its security and 
promise. It is the common sense and the 
common law of life. It governs the Gov- 
ernment, and every man. It is the spirit of 
democracy. American civilization is its best 
fruit. There the rulers are citizens, and every 
citizen is a possible ruler. It puts a hope into 
every heart, and helps it to pray as well as to 
work. It fosters ideas of progression, which 
grow into system, and methodize thought and 
exertion. It makes tests for creeds and plat- 
forms, and widens their scope and purpose to 
a generous breadth and humanity. Sects 
and parties must consult it, or fall apart. In 
its providence, it cares for all, the little and 
the great, the strong and the feeble. Its 
modes may appear levelling processes, but 
the valleys of shadow are lifted up. The 
sun, if it does not glitter upon a promon- 
tory, warms the plain to produce a generous 
harvest. If genius be a little crippled in its 
wing, it is to teach it a steadier flight. If 



232 HALF TENTS. 

the beauty and grandeur of the everlasting 
hills be a little obscured by cultivation, the 
royal vintage will make glad the heart of 
man. 



THE END. 






